Broken Things
by oleanderclouds
Summary: Soon they would breathe the same air again. Sequel to "The Descent". Slash; no pairing.
1. Prologue

AN: I had to repost, since I used a bad word in the summary. Have some other bad words.

**Prologue**

_There is no way to know there hadn't been a basement before. _

_When he'd had the dream as a kid, he hasn't the vaguest clue whether any basements were present. He can recall the shoes, the black and white sneakers, emerging from behind a wall. Small shoes. A child's shoes. The child had always been there. _

_But had there ever been a basement?_

_He was always alone before. That much he knows. The fact that the team are with him now, in his old dream, probably means something. _

_As to the meaning of the basement, he can wager a guess. _

_It starts above ground; on the jet, flying here, it had been a nondescript, darkened and unfurnished house. A long sterile corridor and a closed door. While the house and its gaping rooms are slung with black shadows, there is a rim of light at the bottom of the door. _

_Drawing ahead of the others, he slithers down the hallway towards it, dreamt and therefore not quite real fear shrinking his lungs. The light grows, breaths a mist across the floor, and he's there, his sidearm raised, the door opening at his touch. _

_He knows his way from here._

_There are steps, dropping down into the belly of the house. Awake, he has long since come to loath going underground. The irrational behavior he exhibits when faced with it doesn't seem to lessen with time. He's largely managed to shake the sensitivity to light, the panicked fear of knives or blades of any kind that had plagued him for a time, but this, this intense reluctance to go beneath the surface of the earth, has remained with him more or less undiminished. Occasionally he's been forced to enter such spaces in the course of the job, and the only thing he's gotten better at is the ability to hide his fear. _

_There are many things he's gotten better at hiding. _

_The fear isn't with him in the dream. He descends without its weight pressing him, light feet on the basement steps._

_But the child. The child has always been here. The child is a constant. _

_There is no sign of Adam Morrison, Christopher Early, Kyle Horowitz or any of the other fifteen who died at the hands of Michael Jones. No José Ruiz, no Evan Trudhomme, no Toby Hollander, and neither of the two as yet unnamed ones who are still in the ground somewhere, undiscovered. They still come to him, in other dreams. Other basements. Not this one. Here, there is only the child. _

_The basement itself is different. Nothing like the square space where his life was almost ended. Perhaps it's an accurate estimation of what that basement might have looked like before it was stripped bare and converted to a dungeon, but other than that it has nothing in common with it. It's cluttered and untidy, a place for storage and forgotten things. Broken things._

_Like the child. _

_He's down. Staring at the little shoes reaching from of a dark corner. There are shadows here, unlike the white and barren cellars he's dreamt before. There are places to hide. Somebody's hidden the child in the cold and the dark._

_But I'm here, Reid dreams. I can see him. I found him. _

_Even though no one found me. _


	2. Chapter 1

**1**

_I knew it would be you who came to the cabin to check on me. You must be frightened. I apologize for that. I never meant to cause you any pain. _

_God knows you've had enough for one lifetime._

* * *

He looked different.

The predator didn't know what he should have expected. The purely physical changes weren't very radical at all; about as drastic as they were wont to be in anyone after a little over three years. So young, not even thirty, he had not aged at all in that time. His hair was longer, almost to his shoulders, and wilder, more untidy, the extra length leaving more room for curls that had been easier to tame in a shorter state. His sense of dress had shifted towards something more … professional. More black, less brown. The predator chalked it up to his time in the Bureau; when last they met he had only been a couple of years in, more than enough to gain practical experience but not to wedge him firmly into the pack-mentality of the workplace – to subtly change the way he put together his wardrobe, for example, until he looked more like the people he surrounded himself with every day. In another few years he would probably have discarded the elbow patches and the messenger bag, too.

A sad thought, somehow.

It was the deeper, more elusive changes that affected him. For reasons frustratingly unknown, he walked with a cane – the end of it was carved like a bird's head – but the predator didn't think it was this that made him seem somehow older. Though his face was still as smooth, still as devoid of all but the vaguest suggestion of facial hair, he seemed to have far more years behind him than just the three the predator had marked within the miles of concrete that separated him from the world. Far more years in the way he surveyed his surroundings, taking in the number of security cameras and guards and guns; far more years in the set of his features, the now almost complete lack of that ever-present absent-mindedness the predator had found so endearing. Overall there was more confidence pouring out of his every step, every shift of his ebony gaze, every word the predator could read on his lips through the barred glass doors. He seemed to personify the saying. What hadn't killed him …

It might be that it was a façade, a front. But even so it was impressive. The self-mastery it would take to maintain such a perfect mask was not something he had possessed three years ago. No, he had not possessed it even before he had belonged to the predator. Perhaps, in the distant days before Tobias Henkel had trapped him in the nightmare of his fractured mind, he had been well on his way to becoming this straight-backed creature who now waited with perfect patience to be admitted into the fortified interview room where the predator was shackled to a chair. A succession of doors and gates were already behind him; as soon as he had appeared at the end of the corridor the predator had seen it.

So very, very different.

The initial shock had abated by the time the doctor stepped into the anteroom. With only one set of doors now between them, he began instead to feel profoundly happy. The nervous, giddy light-headedness he'd been wrestling with ever since he'd been informed that this day was finally coming exploded and bled into his limbs; the tips of his fingers and toes numbing in pace with his nervous heart.

He would not call his life these past years a miserable one, but compared to the utter bliss now gathering strength inside him it all melted into a shapeless, colorless blur. All those days, all those identical, uneventful days in the grey solitude of his cell, all of them without discernable purpose.

He hadn't been allowed anything to remember him by. The closest he had gotten to hearing his voice again was the occasional article or essay he had managed to bribe one of the guards for, and even those he had been forced to get rid of lest he was discovered with them.

At times he had ached, unable to transcend the vacant space in his heart. He had missed the doctor, and he had missed the man he himself had once been. The predator.

Some of the guards called him Mike, like his friends and colleagues had done in his past life. The warden, on the rare occasions that he came to deliver information regarding his hearings and whatnot – it was he who had let him know that the doctor was coming – called him simply Jones. In his first year here, when boredom had driven him to try his luck at prison employment, the other inmates had called him a wide range of things.

He wondered how the doctor would address him.

He had been surprised, perhaps foolishly, to find that he had earned a not inconsiderable amount of respect within these walls before even setting foot in his cell. Most of it was due to his success at abducting and nearly killing a federal agent, but the widely known fact that his arrest had been more or less of his own orchestration had managed to make him a legend long before he had expected to become one.

It irked him, how the population he was now part of considered his crimes a defiance, a slap in the face of the government that had incarcerated them. They had stories about him, stories that circulated back to his little nook on death row with an alarming frequency. He had hoped that he would be dead before his name was ever mentioned in the same breath as Gacy, Dahmer and Bundy. He had hoped he would be dead before anyone had time to write a book about him. In three years, six had already been published. Two of them by people who had been part of the original investigations, but the rest were little more than dime store trash. He had read them all, of course, and he couldn't help but wonder if the doctor would ever write one of his own.

At least he was confident that, should such a thing ever come to pass, he would be long gone.

* * *

Evan Trudhomme is five weeks and six days shy of his twenty-third birthday when a man pulls up in a white van next to where he's counting out the fifties and twenties that tonight's business has yielded. He's still high from the cocaine he enjoyed before a recent appointment, and consequently doesn't think it very odd that a car has found its way out here, to the deserted stretch of dockland where he likes to take his tricks.

Not even the gangbangers come out here. Or so he tells the johns if the hulking shapes of the warehouses and the murmurs of the water make them nervous.

When he becomes aware that the van has stopped just short of where he's standing under a flickering streetlamp, he turns around, thinking it must be a potential client. A regular, perhaps; someone who knows this place. He has time to see the masked figure before it's upon him, and then there are strong arms, too strong for his stick figure frame. The bills tumble from his hands and sail to black, slick asphalt, where they scatter like feathers.

Something cold is pressed over his mouth. Every breath he takes through the soaked cloth brings him closer to oblivion. He's held in what looks like a warehouse for three days and four nights. He listens to the sound of dripping water somewhere above him, and wonders if he'll see his parents when he dies. Infection sets in a flesh wound across his chest. He develops a fever which, when it becomes delirium, prompts the man who took him to put him out of his misery.

He weeps over Evan's body for a full hour before he manages to drive it out to a vacant lot and bury him deep in the ground. They are tears of frustration.

He needs to make them last longer.

* * *

It was a little sleeker, a little brighter and a little more efficient than he remembered. More like an office than a research centre. The bullpen was crowded and cluttered, agents of varyingly official appearance dotting the grid of desks and low dividing walls. The amount of files and filing cabinets was impressive in this digital age, and he didn't feel as much like a fossil as he'd thought he would.

Keeping one pace behind Chief Strauss, he tried not to let it bother him how very young they all were. One of them, a rangy kid in dire need of a haircut, didn't look a day over eighteen. As Rossi passed him he pulled a Halloween mask from his head and flattened his lips into a grin. There was a hangman's noose around his neck, and Rossi found himself returning the smile. It was far more satisfying than the dark, tense glances he received from the other agents.

Strauss took him up a short flight of stairs, and there, in a spacious office of his very own, was Hotch. He looked the same as the last time he'd seen him, with the exception of something unmistakably strained both across his shoulders and deep in his eyes. The job, Rossi presumed – that, or his personal life had taken its inevitable toll.

"I'll let the two of you catch up," Chief Strauss said, and left at a brisk trot. Off to roast and eat a small child for lunch, no doubt.

After she had gone not thirty seconds passed before they were interrupted, by another young thing, nonetheless. Her eyes were violently blue and as lovely as the rest of her. She welcomed him with a certain softened efficiency, and everything from her subtle make-up to her spare and controlled movements screamed public relations. Sure enough, she introduced herself as such.

"We didn't have that ten years ago," he murmured after she had breezed back out into the bullpen, leaving a lingering scent of discreet perfume.

"What do you mean?" Hotch smiled. Rossi arranged his face.

"Communications Coordinator," he replied, adding swiftly, "and has she been on TV? I feel like I've seen her before."

"It's part of her job," Hotch confirmed. "To hold press conferences and the like."

"Right. Of course." Looking through the blinds into the mess of desks below, he recalled the recent cases the BAU had played a part in, cases he had been unable to resist keeping an eye on.

"You've had a few media circuses these past years, haven't you? It's not like the old days."

Looking back at Hotch, he saw tension in his eyes again. His smile had all but faded, and his gaze had followed Rossi's through the window. It now rested on the nearest group of agents, where the boy with the noose around his neck was still on his feet, looking like he had wandered in by accident.

Just as Rossi was about to enquire if something was wrong, Hotch took a determined breath. "There are some things you need to know about this team," he said. "You'll be working very closely with them, and I want you to be informed before you start hearing rumors."

Meeting Rossi's eyes again, his face tightened.

"There are always rumors," Rossi said carefully. Hotch gave a small shake of the head.

"Not like these."

Rossi waited for him to continue, but he simply released another quiet breath through his nose and hinged the measured smile back onto his face.

"It can wait." He took Rossi gently by the arm. "You should meet them first."

* * *

The sentence had fallen in under a year. Some kind of record, he'd been told. There had been no trial. His public defender had been formality in a cheap suit.

His death would be pushed through a needle, right into his bloodstream. Just as Michael had planned, long ago, when he chose what state to live in. Just in case. In the minutes before his life was neatly terminated, he would look into the faces of those who had survived his actions, and at times he wondered if this would be when he finally came to feel something like remorse. Something more than the fleeting melancholy of this – this empty existence of fenced-in patches of grass and odd angles of light over walls.

At the top of the corridor, their eyes had met for the first time since that last embrace in the basement. Dr. Spencer Reid looked serious and tense, something Michael could relate to. Even if he hadn't been secured to a bolted-down chair under heavy chains, he would have been frozen stiff. The only time he could recall being this nervous was in the endless moments before he had snatched the very first boy, an eternity ago. Stumbling out of his van onto damp asphalt; arms around a rail-thin body that fought him with infinitely more strength than he had expected. It had taken almost a minute for the chloroform to do its job, a minute in which he had been certain someone would hear the grunts and scuffles and come to the prize's aid.

He had been a rakish thing, too damaged and cynical for Michael's tastes. But his hair had been a halo of silken yellow gold, his eyes large and almond-shaped and bluer than the robin's eggs in the song.

Spencer Reid came to a halt in the anteroom. He stood with his weight resting on the bird's head, his free hand clutching a manila folder. Michael watched both hands through the faded glass. He thought there might be some whitening of the knuckles around the cane's curved beak, but he couldn't be sure. It was mesmerizing. Surely there must be some form of turmoil taking place in that awesome mind. Surely there must be something more than just the tension, the stillness seeming to span his frame. He couldn't see it. If it was there he couldn't see it.

The warden was present, as was Michael's attorney. Another man in a black suit he recognized as a local FBI agent who had conducted a set of what he had called supplementary interviews with him a couple of years ago. A bearded, middle-aged man in casual clothes; he had arrived with Dr. Reid and appeared to be a superior, and lastly a third profiler, big, black and remarkably handsome, whom he recalled well from three years ago.

The conversation was difficult to decipher through the glass. The older agent kept drooping black eyes on Michael throughout, and they all knew he was watching. In all honesty he wasn't half as interested in what they might be saying as he was in taking in the sight of the doctor. He was just as appealing as he remembered him, if not more so. This new confidence, these far more than three years he seemed to have lived since last they met, effectively heightened, tweaked and defined the quiet inner strength that Michael had seen so clearly in him the very first time he got out of that car all those years ago. The subtle, intrinsic strength he had done his best, and failed, to break.

He noted how those in the room who didn't know him, the local agent in particular, cast curious glances his way without ever actually looking at him. Michael imagined they had been given access to certain photographs in which he looked quite, quite different.

He was so close. So very close. Faint irritation as they kept talking, seeming in no hurry. He could not help but count the seconds. Soon they would breathe the same air again.

* * *

Toby Hollander is nineteen when Evan Trudhomme's murderer spots him at a truck stop. He's just used the last of the money he stole from his father to buy himself a cheeseburger and a vanilla coke. One of the waitresses, having discerned he's not, as they say, 'all there', sits with him in the hopes of coaxing him into surrendering his parents' phone number. She is unsuccessful.

When she returns to her work, a man in a nearby booth gets up to ask Toby if he needs a ride. He does. He's going to Hollywood.

He wakes up in the room where Evan died a few months earlier. He lasts only four days, and the man who has raped him eleven times and severed his left earlobe smashes a window in frustration. He does not cry this time. This time it was his fault alone. After Evan he knew to clean the wounds, but there is no cleaning a bleed on the inside.

He's still seething when he buries the body at the edge of a field an hour's drive north.

He'd been too rough. He needs to control himself.

* * *

He had known this day would come.

He had known during the two months he had been exiled in his apartment, and he had known during that first on-location case after he came back. It had involved the Russian mafia, quite removed from the type of case he had been dreading and waiting for and, in perfect pessimism, assumed would come his way sooner than he could possibly be prepared for it.

And now it was here. In a tangled wood in Texas, on a trampled path under his feet, it had come his way. It was waiting for him in a forest creek.

And he was not the slightest bit prepared.

It seemed bizarre, now, to think that he had been looking forward to something as mundane as Halloween. That he'd taken the time to pass a store where he could get the masks and paraphernalia that were, in his opinion, vital to the season, and that he'd found himself practically skipping into work, all aflutter both over the holiday and the fact that the legendary David Rossi was joining the team.

He had seen the masked joy in his colleagues' faces when he arrived in his silly cloud of excitement. He had been secretly pleased with himself for managing such comparatively well-adjusted behavior. It hadn't occurred to him even in passing that today might just be the day when they had to take a case like this.

The sound of his name rang sharply through his thoughts. The act of keeping his eyes on his feet, unaccustomed to the irregular terrain, and his attention on the agent on the path ahead of him proved difficult, and he stumbled a little as David Rossi said, "Do we still keep all the old files in the fourth-floor storeroom?"

Failing to summon at least a fleeting glee that Rossi had just asked him a question he could answer, he cleared his throat. His voice came out dull and sluggish.

"I – I think some are up there. Most of our information's on computer now."

"Right," Rossi said, and if he hadn't been busy trying to rein in the panic Reid would've seized the opportunity to strike up a conversation. That he was to be working on the same team as David Rossi, that he was to be profiling with David Rossi, was a fact that should have reduced him to a babbling fool – that morning it had, with a positive swooning fit over psycholinguistics. Now there was only the panic, a tall opaque wall of it, hurtling up from the creek that waited ahead.

They came to a halt by the water.

"Michelle's body was found right here," Detective Yarbrough said. "I really thought it was a prank."

Reid took a steadying breath, tore his gaze from the still surface below. The detective's weathered face was stiff and drawn with what could only be described as sorrow.

_I really don't understand the world anymore._

"You can't really blame yourself for that," Reid said quietly.

"She made herself dinner," the detective muttered, eyes on the murky water.

"Excuse me?"

"She had time to make herself dinner. That means she was home for a while before he…"

Something moved on Reid's left. He froze, turned his head just in time to see Rossi picking his way along the riverside.

Hyper-vigilance. As if to make sure he got the message, it stayed with him for a moment, receding only once he'd reminded himself that the paperwork hade gone through months ago. He was cleared for field work; he was fine. He was well.

It was an effort not to look at Rossi, certain he had noticed. Beside him, Detective Yarbrough had eyes only for the creek, his hollow stare resting where the dead woman had been found.

"There was time to help her," he finished tightly.

Rossi was pacing the muddy shore. "Water," he said pensively, a stare as hard as Yarbrough's but quite devoid of similar emotions fixed below. "Obliterates a body, destroys evidence."

Reid didn't watch as he stepped up onto a tree trunk to get a better look; eyes on the very same water he tried not to see what Rossi was trying to see. Tried not to hear what Rossi was trying to hear.

It didn't work. White limbs swam before him, broken and used, helpless against a stronger opponent. She was screaming, pleading. He had left her here, discarded her where no trace of her murderer could survive. Completely in his power even after death had ended her pain.

It must be all over his face, it must be obvious. His breaths didn't sound right coming out of his throat. He had to dart a glance at Rossi. Intent on the scene before him, the older agent appeared to have little to no attention to spare, and Reid wondered if he knew at all.

Hotch must have informed him of the various scandals the team had seen in the past years. Especially since his predecessor had been involved in the most recent of them. But the Texas case had come in that same morning; perhaps there had been no time to debrief him. Perhaps he had no idea.

If he'd known, Reid suspected that even the legendary David Rossi would have given himself away.

It occurred to him that Hotch might have been acting deliberately in sending the two of them out here alone. He had clearly decided Reid was ready to visit a site like this, where a victim like this had been dumped –

_Returned._

– which in and of itself was a testament to the progress he had made over the past few months. It meant he had been observant enough to realize that Reid would not want him or any of the others hanging over him, waiting for him to put his wrist to his forehead and faint. It was the sort of thing Hotch would do, even if he'd sooner swallow a chainsaw than admit to having done it.

"But you weren't in the water that long, were you, Michelle?" Rossi was saying, and Reid snapped back to the present. Steered his focus where it was needed. The victim –

_Michelle._

– deserved at least that.

"She had rocks tied to her to weigh her down," Yarbrough said.

Reid heard his own voice as if from a vast distance, and it was almost as detached and professional as he wanted it to be. "She floated to the surface before there was any other damage."

"But just what was done to her already…" Yarbrough insisted.

_I just don't understand any of it anymore._

"The salient…point is," Reid forced himself to say, and though the cool was now gone from his voice he knew it could be interpreted as sympathy, "It was the first thing the UnSub wasn't good at."

"Green River dumped most of the bodies in water," Rossi said slowly. "But they weren't weighed down."

"Well, yeah," Reid muttered, "We know now it's because he didn't care if they were found. He had no connection to them."

It was with the meaning of his words that the abyss came tearing up. It was all in there, a snarled mess that he had ignorantly thought untangled, and as he stared into the dark, wet grave where Michelle Colucci had been found raped, murdered and mutilated, he knew that it was staring back into him. It was laughing at him.

Survival was a tricky business. There were no instructions to follow, no rights and wrongs in its successful execution. It would change its shape and seem impossible more often than not, it would come at you like a sledgehammer one moment and like a gentle fall of snow the next. After having faced the process twice, Reid couldn't say that he had even the vaguest grasp on it.

Like last time, he knew, probably better than most, that the aftermath could be just as much of a bitch as the war itself.

* * *

When they at long last began to break up their little huddle it was the local suit and the bearded man who entered first.

Michael's stomach churned with frustration. He kept his face neutral as a guard opened the heavy door and let it fall shut with a bang behind the agents. The guard who was posted inside the interview room, a squat woman with her hair in a bun, positioned herself in front of the door as though it might be assaulted at any given moment.

"Mr. Jones," the agent in the suit greeted him unsmilingly. "I don't know if you remember me. Special Agent Freeman, we met about two years ago."

"Supplementary interviews," Michael murmured, his attention on the other side of the glass. Dr. Reid was in conversation with the three who remained and appeared dead set on ignoring Michael; the way he stood, stock still and facing away, seemed calculated. As though he knew it would hurt.

Michael had no intention of asking the agents why Dr. Reid wasn't joining them. He had seen this coming, even if he hadn't allowed it to sink in until just now.

The game had begun.

Pulling up chairs, the agents sat down across from him. The beard placed a plastic mug of coffee on the table while Agent Freeman dropped a single folder; for one wild moment, Michael thought it would contain photographs of his prizes – living, at best – but there were only documents covered in text. Reports.

Michael reluctantly shifted his focus to the bearded man. He had an unmistakable air of experience and the shrewd senses it sharpened, and Michael was instantly wary, knowing a worthy opponent when he saw one. He did not doubt that, to him, Michael was just one of many.

He didn't introduce himself. Rested his left shin lightly on his right knee and took an idle sip of coffee. Settled in, it seemed, as if just to observe.

Jason Gideon should have been in that chair. Jason Gideon should have been removing his glasses and thoughtfully lacing his fingers, should have been fixing Michael with a look that could scorch and soothe and seduce all at once.

All the better that those hawk eyes weren't here to see through him.

"Right then," Freeman said, placing his hands on the open folder. "We're here to make an exchange of information. You stated in a federal hearing in March of 2008 –"

"Hang on," Michael cut him off. "I don't have any information for you."

Freeman traded a glance with the bearded agent. Blank-faced, he blinked twice and said, "I'm afraid I don't follow. You have repeatedly stated that you –"

"Stop talking," Michael said quietly. "Just stop."

As Agent Freeman raised his eyebrows in confusion, the beard shifted on his chair, put both feet on the floor. Michael looked into his eyes, dark and no less watchful Gideon's, and licked his lips impatiently.

"I have information for Dr. Reid," he muttered, now addressing the older agent. "No one else."

"We know," the agent said, the first words he'd spoken since entering the room. "I'm Dr. Reid's colleague. David Rossi."

"I know that name," Michael drawled. "You're a profiler."

"I am," David Rossi nodded. "Though we don't call it that."

"Behavioral analyst, then."

A slow nod. Fleeting half-smile. Michael could smell expensive aftershave, just a hint of it.

"I gather you know a lot about my job," David Rossi said, quite pleasantly. He had a smooth, semi-nasal voice, and where Gideon had possessed a near hypnotic talent for putting his victims at ease, this man seemed more prone to lure out whatever reason they possessed. Coax them into thinking.

Michael needed no encouragement.

"Of course I do," he replied, as his eyes drifted to the window. The doctor had lowered his head and was staring into the concrete floor. He would later know every scar, every pockmark on its surface. He would be able to sketch a perfect likeness of that patch of floor for years to come.

David Rossi tilted his head to the side, attempting to catch his eye. A half-smile played around his mouth; glinted in his near-black irises.

"Michael?" David Rossi idly spun his mug of coffee around and around on the table. "May I call you Michael?"

"I really don't care what you call me."

Rossi nodded pensively. "Okay, then." He twisted around on his chair, faced the window. All four men on the other side noticed the sudden movement and looked through the glass, and for one heart-stopping, dazzling moment, Michael was allowed to see a look of perfect frailty on his prize's face before the mask – of course it had been a mask – was slammed back up.

Rossi sketched a gesture on the air. Michael held his breath, not daring to hope –

Sure enough, one of the guards moved to open a door on the left, the only other passage out of the anteroom. The doctor led the way through.

Michael felt his heart break. A hot stab of anger ascended through his chest.

The door closed behind them, leaving only the public defender and the warden on the other side of the glass.

When he met Rossi's eyes again, there was no trace of a smile there.

* * *

"Send in my nine o'clock, would you, Jenny?"

Her nine o'clock was not the high point of her week. Jenny's furtive "right away, Dr. Wilkes" across the intercom did not help – the fact that her secretary had a crush on the very same person who put a weight of irrational tension in the pit of her stomach was not only ironic but thoroughly irritating. Served her right for hiring her idiot niece.

Using the adjoining door, Eleanor crossed from her office into the treatment room just as Jenny was letting him in. She had estimated that there would only be four to six more sessions, and knew how wrong she was to be grateful for this. It wasn't she who had to face the pain.

"Dr. Wilkes," her nine o'clock greeted her with customary awkwardness, glancing nervously over his shoulder as Jenny retreated and closed the door – proof, no doubt, of the girl's complete lack of subtlety in her romantic advances. Eleanor didn't share her niece's taste in men in any way. She couldn't have begun to guess what Jenny saw in the wild-haired, sharp-boned scarecrow that now stepped into the room. She presumed it was either to do with some manifestation of dormant maternal instincts or, more disturbingly and far more likely, a predatory nature she shared with both her parents. If Jenny was the, albeit clumsily, stalking lioness, her nine o'clock certainly fit the image of the fleeing gazelle. All legs and no teeth.

She had not yet found a level where he could be comfortably approached. It was as if his personal space was considerably larger than that of most people. Thus their appointments, which were long and arduous, would range from tense to downright unpleasant. She had to glue the small, professional smile onto her face as she went to greet him.

"Dr. Reid," she mimicked and shook the hand he proffered. It was a bony as ever under her fingers, and unless her eyes deceived her he had lost at least another pound since their last session. Clearly, her advice to eat more food and drink less coffee hadn't registered. Perhaps his own degrees, none of which were in the relevant field, had been enough reason for him to ignore it.

Without voicing her disapproval, she reminded herself that he was young. Young enough to heal regardless.

"Let's get started, shall we?" She gestured to the bed, shrouded in fresh white surgical cloth. "How would you say it's coming along? Any concerns?"

"No, I – I have confidence in this particular method," he said in that speedy, breathless way of his. "I've read everything there is to read on the different techniques, and even if this approach takes time to show results I know it will prove the most effective. Eventually."

As he spoke, he dropped the ancient leather bag he always carried onto a chair and begun shedding his jacket, tie and shirt. In their first sessions, months ago, he had undressed behind the screen that was supposed to serve the purpose, but at some point this modesty had yielded. Eleanor hoped it was a sign of her success in the endeavor to be as professional and calm a presence as possible. It had, at times, proven difficult.

Initially it had been just the tension. The stretching lengths of silence as he exposed the marks of unquestionable violence that marred his otherwise clear complexion. The very first session had by far been the most uncomfortable, when she took meticulous inventory of the scars and determined which ones could be treated and how aggressively.

She had seen many scars in her career. Almost as many as she had seen moles and birthmarks and ill-advised tattoos. But she could say without a shred of doubt that she had never seen anything quite like this. The closest to it that she could recall was a patient who had for undisclosed reasons walked through a window; winding ropes of white had danced like flames up his forearms and legs.

When she had first examined the scars, Eleanor hadn't been able to disregard the fact that the young doctor's pulse was so swift and thin it was almost palpitating. She had seen many patients grow nervous under her touch, but this had been something else. He'd probably thought that the breathing exercises he started going through were too subtle for her to notice, but she had seen his lips move around the counted seconds. Like a parent watching over a sleeping infant, she had waited for each interval to give way to another intake of air. She had caught herself wondering who had made the scars and for what reason, something she never had any interest in contemplating. She hadn't asked.

To this day, after eighteen sessions, she had a distinct sense that any such inquiries would only discomfit her patient even further.

So now, as her nine o'clock settled on his stomach under the ruthlessly exposing light of the surgical lamp, Dr. Eleanor Wilkes arranged her face in perfect clinical detachment.

Donning her goggles and her latex gloves, she set to work undoing the damage that had been done by someone far less attuned to the fragile nature of human flesh.

* * *

Charlie Russell has recently turned thirty-one when his wife throws him out of the house. He doesn't mind. He sets out on his motorcycle with a duffel bag and a roll of money.

His bike, which is uninsured, is stolen at the same truck stop where Toby Hollander hitched a ride with a stranger. He starts walking to the nearest town, and is swiftly picked up by a man in a white van.

What happens to him where two before him have met their ends is not entirely unfamiliar, as some ten years earlier he served a sentence in a state penitentiary for stealing an expensive car. His unblemished skin, strawberry blond hair and large green eyes were precious commodities in there.

After barely five days, he goes into a towering fury as his senses divorce him completely. He can't stop screaming. He screams at his wife and at his mother and father, at the men he belonged to in prison. He screams until the man he belongs to now grows weary and slits his throat.

The killer is calm when he drives Charlie's body to a construction site and puts him in the ground. He knows where the concrete will be poured.

Five days. Five days is good.

He can do better.

* * *

It was probably a keepsake. Something someone had brought from somewhere cold and beautiful. Europe, maybe. He couldn't identify the exact origin of it; it was that generic. A little person, perhaps a child, he couldn't tell, striding through snow that fell only if you turned the little glass sphere that imprisoned it.

He turned it, and turned it again, trying not to listen to the conversation Hotch was conducting with JJ behind him. He could hear him stepping on the spot as he spoke tersely to her, could hear the words "personal matter", and gathered without much effort that his wife had been trying to reach him.

Still peering into the snow globe as if it might tell him something, he waited for him to hang up the phone before asking absently if everything was all right.

"Yeah, fine," Hotch replied, and though it was obvious he had no wish to spend another word on the subject, Reid had to say it. Whether he was saying it for Hotch's benefit or his own wasn't entirely clear.

"We can do this interview another time."

Hotch paced a few steps across the modest little office where they'd been asked to wait for the assistant warden. "He's scheduled to be executed next week."

The words stirred an irrational mix of emotions in Reid, and when he replied it was half-hearted. "I can take the lead if you need –"

"Reid," Hotch cut him off, raising a hand. The look he slanted across at him was partly harassed and partly long-suffering, and if he'd been expecting something like sympathy he'd been mistaken.

It was probably something to do with the fact that they were in a prison. Waiting to seek an audience with a murderer as if he were royalty. Suffice it to say, Reid felt … weird. Since assigned this interview, he'd been tempted to bring it up on several occasions, even though suitable opportunities had been scarce. On Thursday morning, Hotch had lingered by the round table, only to bolt at the sound of Reid's chair scraping the floor. On Monday he had tried JJ, who had claimed she had no say in the matter. She'd used the word "clout".

Ruthlessly, he figured that now, with domestic problems on his mind, Hotch might be coaxed into dropping his defenses regarding the purely professional matters he either could or would not discuss.

He cleared his throat. "Have you gotten anywhere with the directors regarding my request to see Michael Jones?"

There it was, the sympathy. The lines around Hotch's tight mouth softened as if blurred by a sweeping fingertip, and his flint chip eyes found Reid's face. As aware as Reid of where they were and what they were here for, he released a slow sigh through his nose.

It was probably the closest Reid had ever come to catching him off guard.

"Reid," he repeated, and this time it was low, soft. "You know I can't discuss that with you."

"I know that, and it's stupid," Reid shot back, putting the snow globe back on the warden's desk with a little more force than he'd intended. "The conviction is already two months old, Hotch. It's a visit I'm talking about, not an interview. I should be able to visit an inmate at any federal prison in the country without having my own superiors stonewall me every time I try."

"You're a federal agent," Hotch said, like it was new information. "If you were a civilian, you'd have every right to do exactly that."

"Yeah, and it's _stupid_," Reid repeated. Hotch just stared from under his brow. "Right?" Reid added, voice climbing with indignation.

Hotch looked like he was about to answer when the office door opened, revealing a mousey little man in glasses.

He seemed oblivious to the tension in the room, and it took him a moment to figure out who they must be. He introduced himself as Abner Merriman, assistant warden. He then proceeded to inform Reid that he'd read some of his studies. Serial killers were, in his own words, a kind of hobby of his.

"I bet you've met quite a few," he said admiringly.

_You have no idea, _Reid almost replied. He purposefully did not look at Hotch, who was no doubt confident in the knowledge he wouldn't muster the balls to bring up Michael Jones again for at least six months.

According to Merriman, there were no interrogation facilities in the prison. As he was getting ready to show them to the room they could use instead, he paused at the door. Turned a puzzled smile their way. "I have to say, when I heard that he contacted you, I was surprised."

"Why?"

"Chester Hardwick?"

Judging by his tone and the play of his features, Merriman's expressed surprise was not unfounded. Reid wasn't sure why, but it unnerved him. "He doesn't really talk much," Merriman concluded. "To anyone."

Reid gave a slow nod, his thoughts circling in a pattern he couldn't quite follow. Jones didn't talk much, either. Not to just anyone.

"Well," Hotch said. "That usually changes when someone's about to die."

The room they would be using turned out to be a bunker-like space. There were windows, but barring this it might have been underground. Concrete, nothing but concrete.

Reid swiftly began preparing his spot by the little table they'd plunked down in the centre of the room. Hotch's presence, which was usually such an unflinching solidity, was not as calming as he'd hoped it would be.

There had been bouts of claustrophobia, most memorably in a malfunctioning elevator with Morgan, those first months after he was let back out into the field. It should be interesting to see whether he would relapse once they put Hardwick in here with him.

When Merriman saw the crime scene photos Reid fanned out on the table, the childish fascination with serial killers that he's displayed in his office all but evaporated.

"I knew what he did, of course," he stammered. "But I…you know, n-never saw…" Merriman stared at the irrefutable images of Hardwick's work. "Twenty-three victims like this."

"Sometimes in these interviews they talk about crimes they were never charged with," Reid said, "so it might even be more."

Merriman, still transfixed by the photographs, breathed, "Is it ever less?"

Reid thought about that for a second. Wondered fleetingly how he would react to such a scenario.

"No," he replied.

Hotch seemed keen on getting the warden out of their way. As politely as only he could, he took the photos from Merriman.

"Paying attention to these items projects a kind of importance on them – when he comes in, I'd like to give him the opportunity to show us which parts of the crimes _he_ thinks are important."

"Sorry, of course," Merriman said, cowering under both the documents of inhumanity he'd seen and the apparent detachment with which Hotch seemed to view the same.

Moments later, the unmistakable sound of the door roused them. Reid's insides went peculiarly still.

He knew exactly what Hardwick's mug shot looked like. It was as sharp as anything he had stored in his memory. Still he was absolutely convinced, if only for a single throb of his heart, that it was Michael Jones who entered the room. The grizzled moustache, the thick square glasses, the pitted clay-lump features, only registered once the man had taken a full step into the concrete chamber.

Hardwick's attention instantly came to rest on Hotch. Reid might have been part of the décor.

A memory came over him like a bucket of ice water; sitting by a table not unlike this one, a load of files in his arms, Gideon by his side instead of Hotch, and a witness who spared him a single glance. He said he'd been walking his dog.

"Chains left on, right?" one of the escorting guards asked. Reid shook off the memory to the abrupt realization that he was scared.

Really scared.

"That's probably a good idea," he heard himself say, breathless like a little girl.

"No," Hotch cut in. He spoke calmly and fearlessly, almost softly; "That won't be necessary."

"It won't?" Reeling from the stab of unfiltered fear at Hardwick's entrance, Reid couldn't determine Hotch's intentions with this approach. Had this taken place a year ago, he would've picked it up as soon as his supervisor had opened his mouth.

The guard was as skeptical as Reid. "You're sure?"

Still acting like he was at a parent-teacher conference, Hotch assured him that he was.

"We're just going to talk," he said lightly. "Right, Chester?"

As the guards set to work freeing Hardwick from the heavy chains and locks that kept him relatively harmless, Reid sank onto a chair and rationed his breaths. He thought about his mother's shoulder and his mother's books, the attic smell of fragile leather bindings.

He hadn't gone to his safe place in over six months. The department shrink would be melting with pride.

"Sit down," Hotch told Hardwick, not unkindly. Hardwick, in turn, declined to obey, but crossed instead to one of the barred windows. He moved sparingly, calmly, and it was the same calm. The same efficient, strategic and endlessly patient calm Reid remembered from the basement. No ounce of energy wasted. As if it was all hoarded and reserved for an unspoken promise of sudden and irreversible violence.

"I'd like this window opened," Hardwick said, and like his looks his voice wasn't remotely similar to Jones'. It was rough and thick like unrefined oil, with the flatness of indifference shaping each syllable. "I'll answer any question you have, but only if this window is open."

Hotch wasn't thrilled. Shooting a glance at him, Reid saw a frown fold his brow.

"Go ahead," he said, after a brief pause. "Reid?"

That was his cue.

The process of the interview was firmly lodged in his motor cortex, and he could feel his heart rate slowing as he traced the familiar shape of it by stating the introductory facts he had filed away for this occasion.

"Does my birth date really matter?" Hardwick said, his thick face tilted towards the open window. In only a slight stammer, Reid informed him of what should have been obvious; that they wanted to know as much as they could about his childhood.

"There's nothing to know," Hardwick said. "It was average." And he launched into a string of falsehoods, describing in a toneless drone the average childhood they knew never to have happened, the nice house on a quiet street, school and cereal and cartoons. Hotch cut him off in the middle of it, displaying a certain lack of patience that Reid had rarely had the privilege to see first-hand. It was sort of bizarre. A dog playing poker.

"I don't have time for this," he snapped. "You didn't live in a nice house on a quiet street; you grew up in a series of projects in East Bridgeport, each one worse than the last. You spent your teenage years peeping into your female neighbors' windows and burglarizing their underwear drawers when you got the chance. And you set a hundred small fires for which you spent two years in juvenile detention."

"We've done extensive research, Mr. Hardwick," Reid added, and the sound of his own bland tone was distantly surreal. Like he and Hotch had switched skins.

Flashes again. Pinpoint-focused images of the hundreds of transcripts he'd studied over the past year, ink and paper versions of interviews he himself had not been allowed to conduct. Research he had not been allowed to conduct. Witnesses, relatives, victims. All the lives Michael Jones had passed through, most without leaving a mark. "We've talked to almost everyone you've ever known. Including your mother."

At this, Hardwick turned from the window. "Good old Jean?" A smile almost touched his lips. "I'll bet she was a real treat."

"Good old Jean's down the street in a state hospital," Hotch retorted, and Hardwick, smile slipping from his rough-hewn face, stared at him. Nothing else was worth his attention. He was focusing on the only threat in the room, something Reid couldn't see the need for. It was just an interview.

"At this point," Reid spoke up, "lying to us isn't really possible. Or helpful."

"Well, then you're wrong," Hardwick said, eyes cold on Hotch. Looking up at the murderer from his lowered position at the table, Reid felt like a bug. A mite. A speck of dust drifting on sunlight. He could see the basement in there. In the abyss, in the perfect absence of empathy. It wasn't quite as flooring, as incapacitating as he recalled Jones' staring eyes to be, but it was still deeply unnerving. Even if it wasn't he who was the object of it this time.

"About what?" Hotch asked, with the air of a man who had countless better places to be.

Slowly shifting his dead gaze, Hardwick turned back to the window. Angling his head into the slanting light, he muttered, "I started a lot more than a hundred fires."

Releasing a quiet sigh only Reid could hear, Hotch shot a dark glance his way. It echoed his thoughts perfectly – they were getting nowhere. Only minutes in, so far, but this stumbling start was not encouraging.

Turning again from the window, from the clear light he seemed so keen to bathe his face in, Hardwick settled himself against the wall.

"What do you want to hear? How Papa kicked me and Jean's ass every single day? That the kind of thing you wanna hear?"

"If it's true," Reid chirped. He already knew that it was. He already knew that it almost always was.

"Nobody gives a damn about the truth," Hardwick said, almost smiling again. It was the distantly amazed, half-there smile of someone who couldn't understand why he was surrounded by idiots.

He faced the window again, faced the fresh air. Reid was suddenly aware of the walls, the ceiling. The silence of unyielding concrete. The naked glare of the lamp above his head. For a brief moment, he could feel it burning his eyes like it was the sun.

The shadows beckoned from the corners, safe and warm.

"Temperature's dropping," Hardwick drawled. His full attention was now outside the room altogether, outside the prison where he would soon die. "It's that time of year. Warm days, cold nights."

"It'll be summer soon," Reid murmured.

"But not for you," Hotch added.

"No," Hardwick agreed, quite pleasantly, and turned to face them. Again he fixed his attention on Hotch. "Not for me."

Looking between Hardwick and his supervisor, Reid felt like a zoologist skulking in the bushes, watching the lions circle each other. He did grasp the concept of alpha males and all that it entailed, but he didn't have enough insight to know how worried he should be when one of them was a serial killer.

He looked down into his papers. "Let's, uh…let's talk about the specifics of the case," he muttered. "Why did you choose Sheila O'Neill?"

"You gotta show me a picture. I don't know the names."

"Is that what this is all about?" Hotch snarled. "Some chance to relive all of this?"

"I have an excellent memory," Hardwick countered. "I thought you wanted to hear the truth?"

There was a brief but pregnant pause. Hotch cocked his head gently to the side, and Reid, too, was beginning to wonder exactly what they were likely to get out of this.

"The truth is, they meant nothing to me," Hardwick explained. "They were toys, a diversion, and from the moment I decided to kill them they were dead. They begged, they cried, they bargained, and it didn't matter, because _they_ didn't matter."

The light was so bright. What kind of watts were in this thing?

"Sometimes I wish I was normal," Hardwick said, and it almost sounded like he meant it. "That I'd had a regular life. But I didn't."

"Why did you ask us here?" Hotch was looking at the floor, as though Hardwick was no longer worthy of interest. Hardwick, too, looked away, his steel wool eyebrows going up a fraction.

"I wanted to smell the air."

It wasn't the answer either of them had expected.

"What?"

"They've got me on death watch," Hardwick went on. "24-hour-a-day isolation. And I will be until they take me to the death chamber." He was nearly smiling again. "So I wanted to smell the air one last time before I die. Thank you for giving me that."

Tired glare lingering another second on Hardwick, Hotch turned to Reid.

"Let's pack it up."

Reid blinked. "Shouldn't we at least –"

"No – now."

Striding to the door, Hotch spoke to Hardwick without turning as he rang for the guards.

"Have a nice trip, Chester. You're going where you belong."

Dazedly, Reid began to gather up the files and papers and photographs. It was with less than half an ear that he listened to Hardwick's grating, toneless voice as he drawled, "It's 5:17. Evening yard started at five o'clock."

It was only when Hotch went very still, turning from the door with a strange gleam in his eyes, that the words acquired any meaning.

"The guard's staff's outside with population," Hardwick evaluated. "There won't be anyone to open that door for … at least thirteen minutes."

He reached for the crime scene photographs that still littered the table, and as he picked one at random from the sheaf Reid could feel something snap. Unstring. The old face of panic loomed out of the shadows, slithering into his thoughts with the speed and accuracy of a sudden blow to the head. He couldn't die here. He wouldn't. Not like this.

Not at hands like these.

He watched, his head brimming with an odd whistling sound, as Hardwick raised the photo.

"And it took me less than five to do this," he finished, eyes on Hotch as a full smile lit his face. His teeth were the color of old bones.

He dropped the photo back on the table. "While you were doing your research, maybe a question or two about security tones would have been a good idea."

"I heard the tones," Hotch said, oh so calmly. Reid, backing slowly away from the light with no notion of where he was going, thought wildly that he'd heard them too. Without reflecting. Why the hell should he?

Hardwick was still talking, talking and moving lazily about the room.

"So you planned to be locked inside with me? With no guns or weapons?"

"I won't need a gun." Hotch replied, with something horrifyingly Zen to his words, something so far beyond Reid's grasp that it was like a foreign language.

Leaning idly against the wall, Hardwick rubbed the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other. The universal code for impending violence.

"There's no way they're gonna execute me next week," he said gleefully. His voice had some life, now, some animation. Even his face looked more mobile. "Not after I kill two FBI agents. You saved my life by coming here."

Hotch answered him, stated something in a smooth sneer that Reid was only barely able to register. He had reached the shadows, their cool caressing him like a lover, and his mind was working more furiously than he could ever recall it doing over the past year.

Across the room he could see the inmate, the murderer, who in his yellow jumpsuit was just one of many. Chester Hardwick was not special. His preferred victims were small, female and physically weak, and what he liked to do to them was a messy, haphazard business. He'd been caught because of his own lack of organization. His own lack of control.

How many of him had Reid met? How many of him had he studied, analyzed and then forgotten? There was only a select few that actually stood out in his memory. He knew these people. He knew why they did what they did. There was nothing mysterious about them. They were hardly worth anything resembling introspection, let alone the wildfire of hatred. The Chester Hardwicks of this world were skilled at nothing, not even the unrefined acts of evil they continued to inflict upon easy targets. Ignorant, talentless slaves to their own perversions.

As he withdrew into the ink-grey shadows, Reid saw Hotch slide off his jacket. His face revealed nothing, but his eyes were alive with the same promise of blood and broken bones that seemed contained in that simple shedding of clothing. He was speaking, permitting no ominous silences, taunting Hardwick with a choice of words that, in their utter truth, were certain to strike home. It was as if he was eager to get to it, eager to see the psychopath make good on his threats.

"All your life, you've gone after victims who couldn't fight back. The rest of the time you spent looking over your shoulder. Worried about the knock on the door, scared that somebody like me would be on the other side waiting to put you away. At you're core, you're a coward."

Reid's gaze bounced between him and Hardwick. His heart on a spring in his chest, ready to shoot through his ribs. He knew now – and it was so obvious – why Hardwick had kept all his focus on Hotch. It wasn't for this little game, this sticky end he was aiming for. It was all about what his limited intellect could digest. What the radar of his instincts told him to watch for. Hotch had been prickly and impatient since they walked in, frustration that had nothing to do with this interview shining through even his practiced mask of detachment, and this in combination with the fact that he was the only other person in the room who actually spoke the cryptic language of alpha males had encouraged Hardwick to single him out. Ignoring Reid in the process.

Making any weapon of Reid's all the more potent.

He spoke up just as Hardwick's thick body tautened and began to swell with aggression, and though his voice came out loud and high-pitched it was quite steady.

"Chester, do you want to know why you killed those women?"

Bristling with the same unschooled fury that had steered him through his crimes, Hardwick was distracted. Halting in his tracks, he darted a quick glance between Hotch and Reid. It was the first time he really looked at the latter. "What?"

Reid felt a wild kind of calm. The harnessed tempest of being in one's element. Compared to an even remotely worthy chess opponent, Hardwick was a raging imbecile.

"Earlier you said you wished that you were different. I can tell you how you killed them. Why you are what you are."

Hardwick, who had once again – and stupidly – fixed his attention on Hotch, turned to face him at last. Slowly but surely, the animal drained and dripped from his bulky frame. The human being climbed back in.

"You can tell me why I did the things I did?" he said, incredulous and almost embarrassingly curious. It was a mystery Reid knew he wanted solved, and one that he could easily pretend to know the answer to.

So he fed it to him, every piece of fact he possessed laced with the theories that had cropped up in various fields of expertise over the decades. His parents' mental instabilities, the abuse they had inflicted upon him and each other, the percentages of such instabilities in the many breeds of serial offender. The early indoctrination of violence as a natural expression of love.

And, knowing how convincing a hypothesis it could be, the hypothalamus and all its primal glory. How a loving mother could kiss away its perils and keep you on the straight and narrow.

"Your records indicate that you display the symptoms of satyriasis, you're – you're obsessed with sex." Reid's voice was now not only steady but quite cool. "Sex and love are cross-wired with pain in your mind. Additionally, your hypothalamus won't allow you to stop seeking the – the desires that it wants. So you became a sexual sadist. No sexual partner will ever willingly submit to the painful desires that you have, and the only way you can serve them is by making a partner compliant. Making sure that they do exactly what you want them to do. And you ensure that by killing them."

Hardwick, leaning over the table as if the act of listening was a physical effort, no longer made a particularly frightening figure. The bloodthirst Hotch had so expertly lured out was gone, and even when he looked into Reid's eyes, hitting him with the full force of that bottomless emptiness, that _absence_, Reid couldn't seem to muster up any trace of the fear that had ambushed him before.

"Earlier, you said your victims never had a chance," he continued, and the words anchored a dark pull somewhere inside him. "But I think you know deep down…"

He didn't want to say it, didn't want to give it even that single breath –

"It was _you_ who never really had a chance."

Silence. Just a second of it, punching a hole through the tension. Then, and it was music to his ears, the guards' keys in the lock. Hardwick's brutal face was thoughtful and resigned as he turned to the guards that came spilling through the door.

"Everything all right in here?"

"Fine," Hotch said. "We're done."

He picked up his jacket and headed for the corridor without a backward glance. Reid positively sprinted to follow.

"Is that true?" Hardwick said suddenly. "I never had a chance?"

Mid-stride, Reid glanced back at him. Saw nothing but a dead man. A moot point.

As he turned his back to go through the door, he mumbled, quite truthfully, "I don't know. Maybe."

Then he turned from the shadows and left.

* * *

José Ruiz joins a gang at thirteen. At twenty-one manages to get out. He runs, far away, where none of his old friends will find him. He's recently started work at a gas station when a customer who has begun to show up almost every night for a cup of terrible coffee comes crashing into the store, shouting about a hit-and run. José hurries after him into the night, hoping he won't have to see blood again, when he's tackled to the ground and something cold is pressed over his mouth.

He wakes up dizzy and nauseous, concrete and dirty brick walls all around him, and dies six days later from an epileptic seizure. His killer tries to revive him, and then sits with him several minutes after his heart has stopped.

He waits only three weeks this time, before taking another.

* * *

"You'll see him as soon as I get what I came for," said David Rossi.

Michael wasn't surprised. He'd known they wouldn't keep up their end unless all other options were exhausted. He'd done nothing to earn their trust.

It was only natural that they should share a righteous hatred towards him, just as the inmates shared their warped admiration. He saw it in the attempt at indifference in which Agent Freeman had arranged his features, saw it in the embers glowing faintly at the bottom of David Rossi's bloodhound gaze. They looked out for their own.

While it warmed his heart to know they must have seen his prize through the aftermath of his actions skillfully enough to let him be here today, it pained him that they could never truly understand the nature of their relationship. They could never know the fever dreams he had suffered since coming here, could never know how he had ached for death just to be freed from this yearning, this merciless thirst he could never slake. How he saw his former self, the self that had died in that basement so that the doctor could live, in each and every one of the animals he had come across in his encounters with the prison's general population. How he envied them.

A steady breath. Thin and silent stream of air through his nose. He listened to his heart for a moment.

"You'll get what you came for – from him," he said levelly. "After I give it – to him. Either we leave it here, or you let him do his job. I'm sure he's less disinclined towards this arrangement than you are."

David Rossi was motionless in his chair. Agent Freeman, who had watched this exchange vigilantly, had begun drumming his thumb soundlessly against the sheaves of paper on the table.

"You feel like you know him," Rossi said. It wasn't a question. He hadn't even been there, Michael reminded himself. He was involved after the fact. Sending him in here was a thinly veiled insult.

"I know he would have been in here retrieving this information years ago," Michael replied, "if you would have let him. Do you disagree?"

There it was again, the little suggestion of a smile. Briefly, he let himself imagine what it would be like to slice it from his face.

"No," Rossi admitted. "No, I quite agree. He's been waiting for this day, too, as I know you have."

Michael took a breath. Such calculated phrasing, equating him to the doctor. He had learned to decipher the rhetoric a long time ago, when these interviews had been frequent. If the interviewer lacked experience, it sounded like they were reading from a script. The more seasoned ones did it almost unnoticeably.

David Rossi sounded as if he had been there when they wrote the script.

"So what are we waiting for?" Michael asked him. "I'm not going to tell you anything."

"I know that," Rossi said and took another sip of coffee. He looked at Michael's hands, resting loosely in his lap to avoid chafing. "That's uncomfortable," he said.

Michael raised his eyebrows, and he offered his first full smile. "I've never worn any myself, but I've met a lot of people who have. They tend to concur on that."

Michael glanced down at his shackles. "It's not so bad if you remember not to move. That's the point, after all."

Still grinning, Rossi turned to the guard at the door, and Michael knew what he would ask before he opened his mouth.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Agent Freeman protested.

Rossi didn't answer him, and the guard seemed to decide he had seniority. Pulling a set of keys from her belt she crossed to Michael and proceeded to unlock the cuffs from his wrists and ankles. He had to stand up to give her access.

"Thank you," he said once seated again, with a slight inclination of his head. David Rossi lifted one shoulder.

"I know you have no interest in escaping."

"I sure don't," Michael agreed. "There's only one thing I want before they kill me. The sooner, the better. Food stinks in this place."

Another smile; another lazy sip of coffee. Beside him, Agent Freeman was positively squirming – or the FBI equivalence of squirming, which was usually a kind of petrified stillness. Even the drumming finger had frozen. Whatever lead Rossi was giving him in that secret language of theirs, he was following it like he was on a leash. He reminded Michael of the dog he'd had, his trusted Lab. Last he'd heard, a police officer who had worked on the investigation three years ago had taken him in. Nuñez, he believed her name was. He couldn't recall what she had decided to call the dog; Michael himself had never named him.

The impatience was worse now that his hands were free. He could perceive the scope of it – the need, the flaring, all-encompassing need from three years ago, when the doctor had been his.

It was like falling through time, except on the other side of the wormhole he was nothing but a ghost. There was nothing there except the burning weight of the need. Nothing except the memories.

At least he had the memories.

* * *

He sees James Peake in a pub. It is the second time, preceded only by José, that he doesn't act on impulse. He follows him first, studies him. Makes plans.

James is twenty-nine. He's landed a job on a trawler, and is expected to turn up at the docks in a week. He's trying to get settled in, get coordinated, and he's already met a girl with legs that never stop. The man who will be the death of him goes to the bars he visits, and to his gym.

One morning he's approached by a man with an unlit cigarette. When he stops to take out his lighter he's locked in a half nelson, and the chloroform is in his lungs before he can so much as call out in surprise.

On the sixth eve of his imprisonment, he suddenly stops breathing, and the man who has raped him seven times and flayed the skin off his left shoulder is unable to revive him. Several after him will perish similarly, from what the coroner will call "sudden respitory distress". If the predator had to choose a way to see them go, it would be thus; in their sleep. As though he had nothing to do with it.

He has placed José in the dirt floor of a shed in an old cemetery, not a mile from where Evan sleeps beneath roses no one has tended in decades. James he hides under earth and rocks in a stretch of forest, so deep in the ground no animal will dig him out. The predator memorizes the coordinates of the graves, all five of them, for the sake of prudence.

To protect himself.


	3. Chapter 2

**2**

"I don't know where you're going with this," Michael said. "But I'm sure it's important. I find it hard to believe it's more important than recovering those bodies, but hey. You're the professionals."

They just stared. How disappointing. They couldn't possibly believe he would be affected, let alone unsettled enough to talk, by the silent treatment. He put his hands on the table and sighed. Might as well get comfortable.

It was Agent Freeman who broke the silence. After some thirty seconds, he exchanged a glance with Rossi and started fussing with his papers.

"It says here," he began, "that you were born Michael Ray Reader in Birmingham, Alabama."

Ah. So _that _was the point of this. As if he hadn't already had his life story regurgitated back to him enough times to last another lifetime.

"I was," he muttered and took a breath, "in May of 1976. It was a Tuesday and it was raining. My mother was in labor seven hours and my father was passed out drunk half that time. I grew up dirt poor in a trailer where my mother took the beatings so I could have some semblance of a childhood. When the bastard finally succumbed to cirrhosis she married an accountant named Jones and I got to go to college. My younger stepbrother was also my lover, and because I was his hero he let me do anything I wanted. He was my first. He's somewhere in South America now. Insider trading or some such, I'm not sure. Should I go on or do you want to take it from here?"

Without missing a beat, David Rossi took the file from Freeman and went on, "You majored in computer science, and your college boyfriend was called Nate. He was thoroughly heartbroken when you broke it off shortly before graduation, and he recalls you as very charming and thoughtful and your sex life as profoundly normal and a little dull. He never saw any signs of violent or sadistic tendencies. Am I right so far?"

"God, yes. Though our sex life was pretty good; he was a dancer."

"It was in college that you first started leading a double life," Rossi continued as if there had been no interruption. "And the fact that Nate never noticed proves that you were very good at it. You began to frequent S & M establishments, but moved on to prostitutes when the various rules of the clubs got to be too limiting for you."

He had stopped reading from the file. Observed Michael carefully as he spoke. "After college you started your own software company and soon patented a digital surveillance program that made you a relatively wealthy man in almost no time at all. In 1999 you hired a young man named Billy Petersen, who would never report you for sexually assaulting him after a date because you paid him a considerable amount of money not to. Somewhere between then and 2002 you murdered five men and assaulted a number of others, before establishing a hunting ground in the red-light district of Riverside, where you proceeded to abduct and kill four prostitutes over the course of twenty-two weeks."

He shifted positions, leaned over the file. "And we still have no idea why you started dumping the bodies. It wasn't remorse and it wasn't boastfulness. There was nothing extravagant about the way you left them." Squinting up into Michael's eyes, he pursed his lips. "Clean and tidy where someone would find them. You didn't cover them for the simple reason that any material you used would have been another source of evidence. Dr. Reid was the only one you treated differently, and by then you had already decided to surrender. You dressed him in a pair of your own pants and wrapped him in a blanket."

A shiver ran up Michael's spine. He closed his eyes briefly. Rossi noticed.

"My money's on perfectionism," the agent said slowly. "Control. You don't have any narcissistic traits, but you put your soul into you work and need the world to know. Not because it would mythologize you; in fact you seem averse to the fame you've gained. But you couldn't let your actions go unnoticed, because then it would've been like it never happened. Those boys were your passion, your – destiny, if you will, and this was the only souvenir you ever kept of them. This mark that their suffering made in the world. The record of it."

"It would've been great to let them live. If they could have lived they would have carried the memories, like living recordings. But they had to die," Michael sighed, not without regret. "They were all so beautiful, and it just…I don't know, it really stung, having to watch them go or, even worse, kill them myself."

He didn't say it aloud, there was no need, but the doctor – the doctor was perfect in that sense as in all others. All through the end credits he was perfect. His life, right now, was the crowning jewel of his work.

David Rossi pushed the file back to Agent Freeman, who closed it and slipped it into his briefcase.

"You've told us the names of the five people you killed between 1999 and 2002," the younger agent said soberly. "We were able to find one of their bodies because of that. You've already stated that you have no interest in a stay of execution in the case of further convictions, so what confuses me is why you would tell us the names in the first place."

"For the same reasons he just gave," Michael replied with a nod to Agent Rossi. "Without names they might as well never have existed. Without names it never happened."

"And was it worth us finding one unassisted?" Freeman asked.

"Oh, I blame myself for that," Michael said dismissively. "I buried him in the wrong kind of earth. Too loose. All it took to wash him back up was a little rain."

He found himself smiling as he recalled the boy in question. "Toby," he murmured. "He was very polite. Kept asking me what time it was."

"He was developmentally challenged," Agent Freeman said, a little too sharply. It was the first visible sign of that righteous anger, and combined with the politically correct terminology it was hilariously comical.

"I know," Michael replied, holding back laughter as he looked him in the eye. "He told me."

* * *

Misja Ibramovic picks up a trick on a bleak and blustery night, and the man who will murder him has acquired a new car. It's green. Misja likes it and tells him so, and during the seven days he's held in an old bomb shelter the man who hurts him tells him all about it. He's informed of the acceleration, the sound system, the trunk space. Misja tells him in the tongue of his homeland to shove the fucking car up his ass.

Like Toby Hollander many years before, he dies from internal bleeding.

Christopher Early climbs into a van not long before he's to turn twenty-two. He's taken to a loft with band posters on the walls and has the cloth soaked in chloroform slipped over his mouth when he's standing in awe before a sizeable record collection. He lasts six days; the man who has removed his fingernails with a pair of pliers slams his head into the floor after he slips into a catatonic state.

Robert Hess will never give his killer his real name. He meets him at the age of twenty-five, on a street corner he's been working for the past two hours. He goes with him gladly, happy to oblige a young and attractive client. Police will never identify him, as after only four days he's successful in provoking his murderer into killing him quickly. His face is pummeled into a disarray of flesh, muscle and bone, and none of his teeth are recovered with his body. His killer and his colleagues alike will remember him as Rolly. Records will list him as John Doe.

Kevin Silvestri, aged nineteen, disappears from an alley where he has retired to relieve himself. The man who takes him has approached him earlier that day with two folded hundred dollar bills, and been rejected. Kevin's friends will later maintain that Kev had always had what they called a sixth sense.

He stops breathing on his fifth day in captivity. The predator tumbles his body from the backseat onto a deserted sidewalk, where it's spotted an hour later by a woman watering her plants at a window above. Christopher and Rolly are found similarly discarded, in an alley and outside a strip club respectively. Limbs gracelessly sprawled, their bodies like napkins flung from tables at the end of a meal. They're ghost white, their wounds and bruises black against the kind of pallor only significant blood loss can produce.

Their injuries speak clearly of what they survived before they died. But they're whores. Corpses like this have littered these streets before. Only at the discovery of Rolly, whose caved-in face induces shock in the bartender who finds him, do the police realize what they're dealing with.

By the time they think they know _how_ to deal with it, the predator has gone.

* * *

If Morgan never heard Reid scream himself awake ever again, it would be too soon.

Exactly how unnerving it was to hear the sound in the living room of a kidnapped child's parents was more than he was willing to admit to himself. That raw abandon, climbing from somewhere deep in his throat, somewhere the charted regions of the mind couldn't reach. It was the sound of someone clinging to the rock face by the bleeding tips of his fingers, and it was a ruthless reminder that no matter how hard Morgan might try, no matter how fast he might run, he would never get there in time to pull him onto solid ground. All he could do was wake him up.

He didn't know how many times he'd shaken him loose from it. How many times he had found him fighting his pillow, how many times the screams had roused him and sent him blindly stumbling the path from couch to bedroom, from door to bed where Reid lay thrashing like a man possessed.

For some time after he'd moved out of Reid's apartment, he would hear them. In the dead of night, when the shadows had morphed into blackness, the screams would pull him from sleep, sometimes jerk him bolt upright. On more than one occasion he'd been on his feet and halfway out of the room before he remembered where he was, and that Reid wasn't there.

Not much later, Garcia would get shot. He would extend the same courtesy to her. His stay on her couch would be briefer, and he would catch himself making comparisons. He would look at the light, at the colors all around, and remember.

After the arrest of Michael Jones they had remained in town for all of two days. The first was spent almost exclusively at the hospital, from which Reid had been discharged late in the afternoon. In those few hours, the stream of visitors one might expect after a narrow escape from death didn't present itself. The only person apart from the team and a couple of local cops who was compelled to stop by was the rape counselor Erin Strauss, as if to apologize for her own conspicuous absence, decided to send.

Hotch gave the task of convincing Reid to see her to Morgan and Prentiss, and it was the latter who, in her best low murmur, talked him into it. Morgan had thought it a good sign that their meeting lasted a full five minutes. The counselor's pallor and taut expression when she exited the room had been less encouraging.

"It's very important that he talks about the trauma as soon as possible," she'd said, addressing Prentiss as though the men were part of the décor. Reid, she said, had claimed he was "fine".

"If he isolates himself now –"

"He's given a full account of the – _trauma_ to us," Prentiss had cut her off, stumbling ever so slightly over the word. "His statements have been fully documented."

The woman had looked like she was about to ask to see the documents in question.

"You don't understand," she'd said, carefully, as if they did indeed not possess the intellect to grasp her meaning. "He's a _man_. When something like this happens to a man, the recovery process is different. In many ways, it's harder."

"I know," Prentiss had replied, with an audible tremor to her voice that Morgan couldn't recall ever hearing before. "We do this for a living, too."

It had been JJ, Gideon and Hotch who took it upon themselves to return to the house. While Morgan couldn't speak for anyone else, he had read the same guilty gratitude in the faces of Prentiss and Garcia that he himself had felt.

He would catch a whiff of the smell for several weeks to come. Olfactory hallucinations. In the office, in the street, in a Starbucks; he would take a breath and it would be there. The reek of blood like wet pennies, in sharp disharmony with the stink of vomit, courtesy of Detective Nuñez, who had made it halfway back up the basement steps before puking. Sweat; two grown men and four days' stale worth of it; unwashed skin under unwashed clothes. And underneath it all, underneath and on top like a varnish and slicing through, a cross-section of the mess of smells in its entirety, lay the unmistakable reek of sex. Not like the sheets in the morning, or your skin before you showered, but thicker, sharper, _more_. Mingled with the coppery sweetness of blood and a faint but distinct fecal quality, it weaved a deep, resonant stench that Morgan recognized from a plethora of other crime scenes. The smell of rape.

On the second day, Special Agents Lowndes and O'Shea were flown out from DC, and with them came a fresh communications coordinator to replace JJ. The case would be handled by the FBI in liaison with the locals, and all but a tail end of paperwork was lifted out of Hotch's – and the team's – hands. Reid slept, floating on whatever remained of the UnSub's tranquilizer and the hospital morphine, in a nest of cushions on the hotel couch (he wouldn't use the bed), while Morgan perched on a chair facing the door.

Todd Lowndes and Regan O'Shea spent a tense hour there, documenting yet again everything Reid had to say. Chief Strauss came with them, belatedly ready to grace them with her presence, but excused herself as soon as the required and very awkward pleasantries were exchanged. Morgan was surprised that no lawyers had followed like pilot fish on her belly.

"I asked him why he was doing this."

"That was the first thing you said?"

"Yes. It was so – _stupid_."

"To abduct you?"

"Not me. Not specifically."

A pause, one of many, as Agent O'Shea waited for Reid to continue. Agent Lowndes had retreated to a corner of the room, whether from discomfort or respect Morgan couldn't tell.

"You mean it was stupid to abduct someone involved in the investigation?" O'Shea pressed on, courageously if a little insensitively.

"Yes," Reid had said on an intake of breath. He was sprawled like so many elongated bones on the couch, gaze unfocused and evasive. While the smell of the hospital had been washed away in a series of long showers, he still looked ill. He couldn't rest his back against the couch cushions, nor sit for any length of time on surfaces harder than cotton. His face was a lurid blend of black, blue and yellow.

"And he answered you?" said Agent O'Shea. "He answered the question?"

Reid had looked up, his head bobbing on his stringy neck like it was barely attached. His eyes had swam to her face, had narrowed, had drifted away.

"_Because I want to,_" he said in a quiet monotone. It wasn't his voice; wasn't his dry statement.

"Pardon?" said Agent O'Shea.

"He's quoting," Morgan spoke up, raising a hand into the space between Reid and O'Shea. "He's quoting Jones."

O'Shea, who would have been informed of Reid's many skills, sat very still as Reid went on.

"_What did he do to you? _I'm sorry?_ Tobias Henkel. That was his name, wasn't it? The man who took you before. _ , that was his name. He abducted me. He had a dissociative identity disorder, split personality. In his delusion he was the archangel Raphael and he was supposed to…"

As he spoke he switched between simply repeating, adding no particular intonation or emotion to the words, and the same near-whisper that could only be an imitation of Michael Jones' voice. Morgan felt a chill hearing it, because it wasn't how he usually did it. Usually it was just regurgitation, the way he said the lines that were, in this scenario, his own. Morgan had never _heard _the speaker's voice before. It raised every one of the little hairs on the back of his neck.

"_He thought you were a sinner,_" said Jones with Reid's mouth, in the middle of Reid's blank face. There were cracks in his lips, scabs of blackened blood, while a large, wine-colored blotch disfigured his cheek at the corner of his mouth. Similar marks marred his jaw, his neck, the curve of his shoulder. Hickeys.

"Please." Reid's own words, parroted. "You don't want to do this."

"That's enough." Morgan stood. "SSA Reid has written all this down. It's in the reports we filed before we were taken off the case."

He could not keep the bitterness from his voice, which was both pointless and a little embarrassing. Not only would it pose a conflict of interest to keep them on board, it was also hardly in the interests of profilers to be involved as anything but expert witnesses in an eventual trial after an arrest had been made.

Once the agents had departed, Reid had eased himself onto his side and promptly fallen asleep. Morgan knew the time would soon come when the drugs would wear off, and left him to it.

On the jet, they'd all gone without sleep for over a week. None managed to doze off, and most stayed upright and alert in their seats as they observed Reid. Watching, as they were all apt to do on the best of days, without letting on that they were watching. Only Garcia had lacked the subtlety, having to literally be pushed into a seat to keep from approaching Reid where he sat in a windowless nook at the dark rear of the plane. He couldn't seem to keep still, shifting ceaselessly in his chair, and occasionally a terrible, quiet moan would escape him. It was a sound like a dying child, and he didn't seem aware that he was making it.

He had refused point-blank to take the Vicodin that Dr. Sofer had prescribed.

Back in Washington, he hadn't taken to his bed as one might expect. Morgan had taken three days off work to stay with him, and he would later and without embellishment think of them as the worst three days of his life.

During the daylight hours Reid was restless, unable to sit down for more than a few minutes at a time. He didn't speak unless spoken to, but Morgan didn't need words to know that he was still in a great deal of pain. He moved with particular care of the ankle he'd been shackled by, the wrist he'd sprained, and the burns on his back and thigh. Morgan quickly learned not to ask him to take any of the good stuff, but made a point to put a couple of aspirin and a glass of water in front of him every few hours.

Reid kept the curtains drawn and the blinds down, draping every room in darkness. Morgan remembered the darkness, how it cocooned the apartment. It became a vessel floating in nothing, a vacuum where time was not allowed to move. Whenever Morgan got Reid to lie down he would arise repeatedly, going from bedroom to living room to kitchen and back, and then again ten minutes later. It was like fearing for a newborn; a deafeningly silent, six-foot newborn who shunned food, rest and attention.

The first night back Reid didn't sleep at all. On the second night Morgan talked him into taking a pill, and he was out like a light until the crack of dawn – at which point he woke a passed-out Morgan by screaming at the top of his lungs.

He'd had to slap him hard across the face to rouse him. And even then, when logic scattered the wild-eyed panic, he crawled as far away from Morgan as he possibly could, pressing his injured back into the headboard and mumbling, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry…"

"You have nothing to be sorry for," Morgan had said and, without thinking, reached for him.

"Don't," Reid had snapped, both hands coming up; and then again, as if he'd insulted Morgan, "I'm sorry, I just…I'm sorry."

"Stop with the fucking sorrys," Morgan snarled. "Okay? Don't ever say you're sorry again. You have _nothing _to be sorry for. Nothing."

Reid had stared, owlishly. By then the bruises on his face were beginning to fade, and for a moment, just a moment, he had looked like himself.

It struck Morgan several times in those first few days how easily it came to him – and the rest of the team, for that matter; even Reid himself – to deal with the broken, grieving shards of people who were left otherwise unharmed in the wake of a crime. Morgan knew how to assess their emotional state and how to calm or comfort them accordingly. He knew how to get information from them, and how to make them understand that they were blameless.

But it was a rare thing, as a profiler, to find yourself in the presence of living victims. It had happened a handful of times in his career at the BAU, and it was an altogether different situation.

On the third night, when Reid was down on another pill, Morgan had found his stash. It was pathetic, really; a neatly tied plastic bag stowed under a false bottom in the wardrobe. In addition to the round little bottles of Dilaudid and packaged, sterile needles, there was a small bag of marijuana and a sheaf of cigarette papers.

With a glance at Reid, curled on his side with a well-thumbed Proust on the sheet beside him, Morgan put it back where he found it. A few hours later he was awoken yet again by Reid's half-deranged shouts; stumbling from couch to bedroom door, he'd had time to think that it sounded as if someone was gutting him.

Gideon had taken over on the fourth day, staying behind to teach when the others were on-site. The relief of getting away from those murky rooms, the long ghost that was Reid haunting them, and the screaming, was almost more than Morgan could bear. He'd never loathed himself more. He was back on Reid's couch within a week.

A week later Reid came shuffling into the BAU. If not for the crazy hair, he would have been indistinguishable from an old photo of a holocaust survivor. He no longer moved as if everything hurt, but still his limbs seemed too heavy to carry. The odd grace he usually possessed was gone, the spidery lope replaced by a twitchy clumsiness. He was there for an appointment with the department psychologist, after which an inescapable schedule would be set up – a prerequisite for his eventual return to duty.

Morgan was no fool. He'd never been one. In his youth, he had been tempted to lapse into that old and tired role that was more or less expected from him, but circumstances had chased him elsewhere. He was no fool. He knew – he _knew_ – that Reid would never fully recover.

If pressed, he might admit that Reid would never have fully recovered from what had happened in an old graveyard in Georgia, either. Just like he might admit that he, Morgan himself, would never fully recover from what had been done to him by someone he had trusted. Someone who should have kept him safe.

A month or so after Jones' arrest, when Morgan arrived at Reid's place with calories in the form of takeout and donuts, it had been Reid himself who brought this up. Startled, Morgan had sat down by him, keeping the careful distance that had by now become habit.

"How…how often do you think about it?" he'd said.

Folded in three; back, legs and shins, he'd accomplished the feat of looking small. His long hair was in sheets over his face, making him more of a woman than a man. A frightened child of a woman. "Do you think about it at all?"

"I do," Morgan had replied. "Not every day. Not even once a week. But when we get a case…"

Reid had feverishly met his eyes. "A case like yours?"

Morgan made himself nod. Made himself answer.

"A case with a kid, yeah. Boy or girl doesn't matter. I can stay professional. No problem. But I think about it all the time on those cases. All the time."

"All the time?" Blinking, Reid unfolded and sat up straight. Still small; with the ever-present shadows pooling in the planes of his face, it was glaringly obvious how thin he was. Just a parchment-thin layer of skin over bone.

He had drawn a low, tremulous breath. "How the hell am I ever going to get back to work?"

Morgan had peered at the creature before him, searched for the old Reid there, in this broken version. He knew there was no such thing as a default state, not after Georgia and not after that basement, and perhaps Reid had never possessed one in the first place. Morgan recalled a boy, not a man; a boy with tall walls erected between himself and lesser intellects. Your average genius, in other words.

He'd become a better profiler after Georgia. A weaker, but better, man.

Another month later he was back. The final result of the HIV test arrived negative, as they'd known it would, and one Monday morning he was spreading his notebooks and tomes and various geek paraphernalia over the desk that had been vacant for what felt like forever. Hotch had his great hovering wings over him from the first briefing, and the rumors that had flourished in his absence died down mysteriously.

They were made aware that his PTSD was severe, and he remained by his desk for another month. By the time he was permitted to carry a gun, Garcia was just about ready to strangle him. They all developed new habits, learned to avoid sudden movements and to keep doorways clear. At lunch they would choose food that needed no knives, sticking to forks or spoons or chopsticks.

It wasn't long after his first on-site case that the hearings started. As his supervisor, Hotch was the one who had to accompany Reid to his, while the rest of the team sat one by one through hour-long question-and-answer sessions. Hotch also had to sit through Jones' hearings; they quickly learned to keep track of when these took place.

Thinking back, Morgan reckoned Reid's progress should have plateaued during those weeks. He couldn't even begin to imagine what it must have been like, shut in a room with bone dry lawyers and a judge, listening to the furious clicking of the stenographer as every word he made himself say was etched in stone.

But if he had suffered, which he must have done, he had hidden it well. He had continued to show less and less symptoms of the PTSD, had continued to handle each case that came their way with increasing focus and diligence. At times he had even seemed obsessed, letting the work consume him, which they had chosen to think of as healthy. His regular appointments with the shrink came to an end (when he agreed to find a therapist outside the Bureau), and they had celebrated his last session at a bar, which he seemed to enjoy even though he nursed the same glass of Pinot all night. Even with throngs of merrymakers on all sides he had relaxed, and didn't stammer once when a skinny thing in a tight Superman t-shirt and artfully oversized glasses pretended to trip into his lap.

Now, in the dead silent home of an abducted little boy, it had been over a year. It had been over a year, and the night was full of his screams again.

This time, Morgan wasn't the only one who was awoken by them.

"_Get him off me! Get him off! Morgan, get him off me!" _rent the stillness just as he came skidding into the Bridges' living room. The sight of Reid fighting an invisible threat right there on their sofa sent his heart into his throat.

"Reid!" He switched on the nearest lamp and shook Reid by the arm, lowered his voice when he remembered the two people upstairs; "Reid, wake up – it's Morgan."

Reid's eyes fluttered open. As he blinked up at Morgan, as confused as he was scared, he made no attempt to get out from under the hand on his shoulder. Before he had time to say a single word, a sharp voice spoke behind them.

"What the hell is going on?"

Hurried footfalls, muffled on carpeted steps, and then Craig and Amy Bridges were standing halfway down the stairs. They looked remarkably unruffled for people who should have been sound asleep.

"Sir, ma'am," Morgan said, reluctantly turning from Reid to meet them at the foot of the stairs. "Everything's okay."

Craig Bridges was unconvinced. "You wake us up screaming and you think everything's okay?"

Morgan cast the briefest of glances Reid's way. He was sitting up.

"Look, I understand we startled you," he told Mr. Bridges, praying his face was as reassuring as he was trying to make it look, "and I'm sorry for that."

"You're the FBI," Bridges snarled.

"You're right." Reid, in a frail and disconnected voice. "You're right, I'm really sorry."

Spending as long a second as he dared observing his colleague's face, Morgan told the Bridges to go back upstairs. "It was just a misunderstanding. Everything is fine, I promise you that."

Shooting Reid one last incredulous glare, Craig Bridges turned and stomped back up the stairs. His wife didn't move. Her eyes, as dead and unyielding as they had been since they arrived, were pinpoints on Reid.

"Are you okay?" she asked him softly.

Reid had gotten to his feet and wouldn't quite look at her.

"It was a dream. I'm really sorry," he replied in that same flimsy voice, struggling to get the words out. He met her eyes briefly, upon which Amy Bridges' narrowed to slits.

"Was it about Michael?"

For one black, plummeting moment, Morgan didn't know which Michael she was referring to. Judging by Reid's face in the single heartbeat before he wrenched his eyes onto the floor, neither did he.

"No," he whispered after a bewildered pause.

Amy Bridges shifted on the stairs. Something distantly like panic crept into her features.

"I've been afraid to close my eyes," she said slowly. All the things she was unable to think, feel or say were there in the ice in her voice, and even in the midst of his concern for Reid, Morgan could feel her pain like a knife's edge. A mother's pain, quite unlike anything else.

"I'm scared I'll see him die," she finished, still staring at Reid. He looked back, met that stare with a numbness of his very own.

"Ma'am," Morgan said, keen to interrupt whatever was taking place between them. "I know it's hard. But I need you to go upstairs and try to get some sleep."

Amy Bridges didn't move. Something as obscure and unreachable as another person's nightmares, in the absence of her own, had been allowed to house all her fears. It was a behavior Morgan wasn't surprised to see, but the timing could not have been worse.

"Please," he insisted. "I'm sorry for the disturbance."

Finally, she looked away. Turned slowly on the step. Followed her husband up the stairs.

Morgan watched the hem of her white robe whip around the corner; waited for the upstairs light to switch off, before allowing himself a quiet breath. A creaking behind him told him Reid had sat down again, and, steeling himself, Morgan turned to face him.

"I'm making everything worse," Reid said. Morgan took the three steps across to sit on the edge of the coffee table.

"Reid," he murmured, giving himself a second to organize his thoughts before he voiced them. "These cases get to all of us, but…I mean, is there something about this that…?"

And, horrified, he realized he couldn't say it. The smell was there, again, sharp in his nose. Copper and exertion and bodily fluids.

"No," Reid said instantly, shaking his head like a wet dog. "No. There isn't. There's a basement, but…"

"You said 'get him off me'," Morgan pointed out, careful to keep his voice neutral. "You screamed it."

"I did?" Reid blinked. "No, I…I didn't. It was…leeches."

"What?"

"Leeches," Reid breathed. There was something in his eyes, now, that Morgan wasn't sure he recognized. "There were leeches all over me. I was covered in leeches. I said 'get _them _off me'."

And he put one hand to his chest, as if making sure there was nothing there.

Morgan studied his face. "What do you think that might mean?" he asked. "Leeches?"

Reid met his eyes, still confused, and seemed to have to search for words.

"I don't think it's that obvious," he said. "This was…it was different, Morgan. It's not Jones. It's not the same basement."

He sounded less and less confused with each word. Less and less frightened, more and more certain. "It's not the same basement. Jones wasn't there."

He raked long fingers through his hair, breathing deliberately through his nose. "He wasn't there."

"Okay," Morgan said softly. He watched him rub his hands across his face, watched him grow calmer with each breath. "Then…what the hell is scaring you, man?"

Gaze far away, Reid bit his lip. He stated the simple, awful truth that should have been obvious all along. The truth that had nothing to do with basements or nightmares or darkest water under the bridge.

"This boy's gonna die, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

* * *

"You stated when you confessed to those five murders – and we had matched three of the names to actual missing persons – that you didn't remember where you had buried the bodies."

"That's right. I did." Michael kept his gaze on Agent Freeman. "I lied."

"In order to gain leverage."

Allowing himself a snort of laughter, Michael shook his head. "You sound as if you expect me to turn around and ask for leniency."

Freeman glanced at Rossi, who was gazing pensively into the tabletop, before answering.

"Yes. We discussed this when I first interviewed you, if you recall. You will release the locations of the bodies, but only to SSA Reid. The information may not be recorded in any way, which is why there's no such equipment in use for this interview. Only…SSA Reid may know. You won't need to lead us to the locations as you can give – him – the exact coordinates."

Michael saw no need to answer him. He shifted his gaze to David Rossi, sensing that the older agent was about to make a decision.

Another moment of oppressive silence. Freeman was once again all too still, waiting for a fresh tug on the leash.

"I suppose I should let you know," Rossi finally said, in an all too offhand sort of way, "that there are no surviving relatives to mourn for those boys."

Michael felt his eyebrows go up. Tried to deduce where this was going. Not at all comfortable with the fact that he couldn't.

"If you say so."

Rossi narrowed his bloodhound eyes.

"You wouldn't have bothered to find that out," he said. It wasn't a question. "It wouldn't have crossed your mind. Am I right?"

Michael stared. Kept his face uncommunicative. The agent knew he was right; there was no need to confirm the assumption. Rossi, it seemed, wasn't expecting him to.

"Evan Trudhomme was an orphan," he went on, "and no one in the foster homes he passed through even remembers him. It was a young prostitute by the name of Candy who reported him missing, and she killed herself not long after. Intentional overdose."

He made an idle gesture with his hand, as if to say _hey_. Shit happens. "And José Ruiz's older brother, who was the only family he had left, was killed in a drive-by shooting back in '04. As for Toby Hollander, well…" Another careless little gesture. "His parents were rather long in the tooth when he was born. And we already found him, didn't we?"

He put both elbows on the table and looked Michael in the eye. "And I think it's safe to assume nobody misses the other two. What was it you called them? Chester and Carl?"

"Charlie and James," Michael corrected him, startled to hear just the smallest tremor to his words.

"Well," Rossi said, exchanging a glance with Freeman. "No one cared enough to report them missing."

Taking a little breath of his own, Michael looked from agent to agent. Try as he might, he couldn't discern the scope of what Rossi was talking about, and it made him just a tad impatient. And impatience, especially in here, where time stood still, made his skin crawl.

"So?" he said, too sharply. "Is there a point to any of this?"

Rossi shrugged. Stroked his salt-and-pepper beard.

"Well," he said again, "it means that there are no families who've gone all these years without knowing."

And abruptly, it was clear. Rather than dawning slowly on him, it cracked open, and Michael went cold. All the way to the bone. Judging by David Rossi's face, the agent knew his words had struck home.

"I don't know about you," he said, turning to Freeman, "but I'd be far more concerned with finding those bodies if I'd had Candy or Fernando Ruiz calling me up every week. You know how they get, when we find something new?"

Freeman nodded solemnly.

"It's exhausting," he said, and sounded like he meant it. Both agents gazed at Michael, who scrambled for his wits. It wasn't so much the implications of what they were saying so much as it was the shock of realizing that he'd actually missed something. He didn't miss things.

It must be prison, he reasoned. Prison had made him dull. And why wouldn't it? It had been almost four years since he had last been immersed in the process, the beautiful, perfect process.

He had never missed it more than he did right now.

* * *

With the light from the street warming her face, there was no escaping how beautiful she was. A small, peaceful smile was on her lips as she paced leisurely down the length of his bookcases, keen, grey eyes tracing the backs of the volumes. She paused in front of the shelves that held his professional literature, and suddenly, irrationally, he wanted her away from the grisly, tell-tale titles. He wondered, for the hundredth time, at the way she seemed to have shrugged off her experiences with a serial killer just a few weeks ago, and he wondered at the effortless joy that seemed built into her very foundations. Like she could reach inside herself and find any number of reasons to be happy. He didn't understand it. It made him doubt whether he had any business being in the same state as her, let alone the same room – and on a date? How the hell had this happened?

"Have you read all of these?" Austin asked, gesturing at the thousand or so books that crowded the shelves. "Every single one?"

"Uh ... yeah," Reid replied inarticulately.

"Holy crap," Austin laughed, and her voice was like honey. She was impressed. She looked at him, and he was once again dumbstruck to see her there, in his living room, just a few feet away. Two measured steps could take him there.

She wore a low-cut print dress and matching red lipstick, with her dark hair in glossy tumbles around her shoulders. He'd spent half a minute studying the antique-looking clasp that gathered it at the nape of her neck while they waited for their table; the little stones set in it were almost exactly the same shade as her eyes in candlelight.

"Are you okay?" she said now, taking a step closer to where he stood frozen by the kitchen doorway. Those eyes, like jewels in the half-light, shifted to his left arm, and he followed her gaze to see that his right hand was clutching at it, his thumb rubbing the inside of his forearm through the sleeve. He let both hands drop to his sides. He'd been sure he'd stopped doing that.

It was one of two scars that he'd been informed could not be removed. The other was a pitted mess of white, knobby tissue below the base of his neck that would sometimes emerge from behind his shirt collar when he twisted his head a certain way. On cold days, that one would ache distantly, like an echo of the teeth that had made it.

Forcing a smile, Reid began instead to fidget with his cufflinks. "I'm fine. I'm great," he said breathlessly, because she was still advancing on him. He watched her hips move under the soft folds of her dress, watched her pass into the light spilling from the kitchen. There was the smallest of creases in the peach-pearly skin between her brows, and he knew that neither his voice nor his face had been very convincing.

"You sure?"

A warm hand came to rest on his left arm, his scarred arm, and he thought he could feel the old knife wounds tingle.

"Yeah," he said, too airily. "Just a little nervous, I guess."

Austin tilted her head to the side, smile widening. She gave his arm a little squeeze.

"Well," she said huskily, "you should be nervous."

Reid's mouth went dry. "I should?"

"Oh yeah. Because I came all the way from Atlanta for this date, and I have some serious expectations. A few magic tricks aren't gonna do it for me, this time."

"Really?" Reid said, and the would-be amusement came out a nervous exhalation. Her words were gentle, the threat in them a jest, yet they made his heart pound with a whisper of dusty, outdated fear. He chewed his lip, tried to let her beautiful face and light touch have the intended effect. He felt his gaze sliding, slipping sideways.

"Spencer?" she said, smile flickering, and trailed her hand down his arm to weave her fingers into his. It was a chaste gesture, unflinchingly affectionate.

"Do you…" he heard himself murmur, still without looking at her. He cleared his throat, not sure what he'd meant to say.

"Do I what?" There was a hint of concern in her voice. "Spencer, what's wrong? I thought we had a great time tonight, and now it seems like you're…I don't know, scared of me or something?"

"I did have a great time," Reid said quickly, forcing himself to meet her eyes. "It was the best day I've had in a really long time." A snicker escaped him. "A really, reallylong time."

"Then what's wrong?" she insisted. Reid found himself staring into those enormous eyes of hers, and couldn't bring himself to lie.

So he said nothing.

Austin raised his hand into what little space remained between them. Wrapped her other hand gently around it, and brushed her lips across his knuckles.

"You saved me, you know," she murmured, eyes never wavering from his. Her palms were hot around his fingers.

He recalled the sight of her kneeling under the raised flash of a knife, her broken sobs as he tore the duct tape from around her wrists. _I called you,_ she'd said. _I called you._

"My team did," Reid corrected her, but she just shook her head.

"No. It was you," she breathed. "Just you."

And suddenly one of her hands was on his neck, not far from the knotted scar, and she was pulling him down for a kiss.

It was soft, sweet, mild. It should have been lovely. Something short-circuited in Reid at the feel of it, of another person's mouth pressing his with the unmistakable pull of desire, and he broke away without really knowing what he was doing.

"I'm sorry," he stammered, slipping his hand from hers and backing away, wiping his mouth. "I'm really, really sorry, I –"

"Okay, now _you're_ scaring _me_," Austin said, hurt and wide-eyed. Reid took two, three, four long and purposeful breaths. Oxygen hit his blood like a punch, and he felt dizzy, unfocused.

"How do you do it?" he blurted, eyes anywhere but on her. Austin stared.

"Do what?"

Reid tried to find the words. "How do you just – live? Someone was going to kill you, would have killed you…"

Gaping stupidly, he ran a hand over his face. Austin, in turn, looked like she was contemplating something, which was not at all what he had expected. He was, in fact, baffled that she was still there at all, and not entirely certain she hadn't already made a run for it and that he wasn't talking to a hallucination.

"Let me get this straight." She took a fearless step towards him. "You're freaking out because I'm not messed up about something that happened to me several weeks ago?"

"No," he said desperately, resisting the urge to keep retreating. "No, you don't understand."

"Damn right I don't," she replied. "Care to explain it to me? You're the genius, right?"

Yes, he was. He certainly was. But this particular explanation wasn't one he could memorize from a book. This wasn't something he wanted to place into the air on a first date, or any date, at any time.

They were whispering to him, now. Louder than they'd been in a long time. Tobias, helpless and weak, and Raphael, cold and grave and terrible. And Jones was there, too, sneering and taunting and wanting more than anyone could ever give.

_You know why I chose you._

He looked at Austin, letting the ghosts walk their tired paths through his thoughts. Saw the indignation and vigilance drain from her lovely features, to be replaced by worry.

"Spencer…?"

"Don't," he said sharply, as she made to take another step towards him. "Just…don't come any closer."

"Please tell me what's wrong," she whispered, one hand raised as if to reach for him.

Why wasn't she walking away? Why wasn't she running?

_He'll win in the end_.

"No," he heard his own voice mumble, almost inaudibly. "No, he won't."

"What?" Austin said. "I can't hear you."

He met her eyes again, her huge, radiant eyes. There was no fear there. No judgment and no wants.

No shadows.

And he found his words, found them where they'd been hiding in plain sight.

"I have to tell you something."

* * *

Once certain his voice would come out the way he wanted, Michael dared to speak.

"But that doesn't matter, does it?" he said to Agent Rossi. "You still want to find them. Or have I missed something?" He offered a lazy smile. "You have your rules. Your policies. I can't imagine you would use the fact that there are no living relatives as leverage against _me_. If the press got wind of anything like that…"

"You misunderstand me," Rossi said, quite politely. "We are simply saying that the matter isn't nearly as urgent to us as you seem to think. The only reason there are three profilers here today is because one of them has been insisting to see you for the past two years. About this, about them. The lost boys."

The air thickened in Michael's chest; the doctor had wanted him. It was allowed a moment to wind through his thoughts, that old bridge of strange and glorious power that had once spanned between them.

"But if we find that you're not cooperating," Freeman said, on a subtle cue from Rossi, "there's no reason not to simply wait for a time when you're ready to. However long that might take."

"Three years is nothing in here," Rossi added, motioning at the place in general. "It'll be at least another two before you get anywhere near those needles."

Stock still in his chair, Michael willed his thoughts to stay on track. Willed them away from the formless frenzy that was looming ahead, tried to fill them instead with the doctor's face. His face and his eyes and his voice, and having it all in reach again.

"So," Rossi sighed, "it's all up to you whether today is actually going to be the day when you provide Dr. Reid with the location of those missing bodies. It would be a trip wasted if we had to go back to Quantico with nothing. But like I said – we've got time. And so do you." He smiled. Truly smiled, his face cracking in half. "Nothing but, I'd say."

Michael was no longer certain how to best respond to this man. He was good. Very good. Almost as good as Gideon. With a twinge of bitterness, he wished the doctor hadn't been foreseeing enough to bring him.

Producing a level glare that had proven very effective in the past, he looked into Freeman's eyes. Childishly pleased to see them flicker aside, he turned to Rossi.

"I told you," he said quietly, articulating each word, "that I would give him the boys. And I will. But only him."

Straightening in his seat, he placed his hands, palms down, on his knees. "So why don't you two just fuck off and tell him that?"

He didn't raise his voice, didn't even let it waver, but he could tell that the aggressive choice of words amused David Rossi. Pleased him, even. As though he'd finally gotten what he came for.

"All right, then," he said lightly, grasping his empty coffee cup. Michael watched him push back his chair and get to his feet. "As long as we're clear."

"We're clear," Michael all but snarled. Freeman practically shot out of his seat.

Michael was motionless as Rossi motioned for the guard to secure him, wrists to ankles, ankles to chair. He had expected this – anyone who was ready to leave his hands free around Dr. Reid had no business in the FBI – and the thirty-odd seconds it took provided him with a window in which to clear his head.

An endeavor which was usually successful, it was now virtually impossible to shake off the anger. This, in turn, riddled him with self-doubt, and, still seething with the fact that he hadn't even seen it coming, he was forced to admit that he'd been outplayed. The doctor would be ushered into his presence well before he'd managed any kind of hold on his emotions, and he would be lacking the one weapon that had never failed him.

His control.

* * *

Joshua Hale is twenty-five years old when he leaves the house to get groceries. His wife reports him missing after four hours of hoping that he's only gone to get a beer; sneaked an innocent breather away from her and their three month-old baby.

They are the last thing on his mind before he slips into a coma. When his body is found he has been gone a week.

Twenty-two year-old Silas O'Rourke earns his tuition money at a bookstore just off campus. At six in the morning, when he arrives at work to do inventory, there is no one around to see the man who steps from the shadows and slips a needle into his neck.

He's held for nine days.

Michael Preston, twenty-eight, disappears on his way to pick up his wife and two children at the airport. They've been to visit her mother, and during the week they've been away he's felt like somebody's been following him on more than one occasion.

When he doesn't turn up at the airport, when he isn't even waiting at home with a reasonable excuse, his wife reports him missing. When he's found eight days later, the authorities are forced to accept that the Riverside Stalker appears to have relocated to their jurisdiction.

Kyle Horowitz is still not quite used to being thirty years of age when he's taken from his home in the dead of night. He never wakes up, and when he comes to in pitch blackness he slips into a panic attack. It's this panic that finds him again on his fifth day in the basement, and when the man who has raped him fourteen times can't calm him he chooses to kill him with a single blow to the head.

Adam Morrison is twenty-one. He's heading back to the dorms from an evening lecture when, as he's cutting across a dense patch of greenery, someone creeps up behind him and sticks a syringe into the vein below his ear.

He wakes up in darkness and begins to pray, and doesn't stop until he exsanguinates seven days later.

Timothy Berg will be twenty-seven in a month. He's taken during a cigarette break behind the college library. His death and the consequential dumping of his body is the final straw for the locals, and that same day the chief of police calls up Jennifer Jareau at the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. She and a team of profilers arrive from Quantico within two hours.

Spencer Reid is twenty-six when a man enters the police station through a disused fire escape. He's held in a brightly lit basement for four days before he turns up in an alley, freezing and injured but far from dead.

The man who raped him, cut him and burned him before letting him go is arrested and sentenced to death. When he's put down like a dog in a brightly lit room in front of the parents, wives and siblings of those he murdered, he feels remorse for one thing and one thing only.

That Spencer Reid is not there to watch him die.

* * *

"Hello, Michael."

Favoring his bad leg, he limped slowly into the room. Glanced at the guard as she stepped out into the antechamber and closed the door behind her, leaving them alone in the dense silence. Another condition of this meeting. Moments later, blinds were lowered on the window facing the chamber, shutting out the watchful visages of the three agents outside.

The blinds were new, and had been fitted especially for this occasion.

"Hello, Dr. Reid," he returned, and failed to keep his voice as steady as he would've liked. It trembled, thick with the emotions David Rossi had managed to upend.

A steadying breath. "What happened to your leg? If you don't mind my asking."

Dr. Reid had halted a few feet short of the table where Michael sat. One hand tight around the bird's head of his cane, the other cradling the files he had brought.

"I got shot," he said. An awkward smile touched his lips. "First time for me."

"The only time, if statistics are to be believed," Michael replied. His voice came out more levelly if he raised it, so he chose to speak a little louder than he was strictly comfortable with. "I gather that most profilers go their whole careers without facing a gun."

Dr. Reid nodded, once and just a tad uneasily. Left it unsaid that most of them went their whole lives without being abducted by the subjects of their work.

Now that he was in the room with him, Michael was positively aflutter to see how he would conduct this meeting. How he would go about getting what he wanted. He could smell him, for the first time in grey and stagnant eons. Prison soap and the vaguest trace of sweat; coffee, strong and sweetened, on his breath. Underneath, startlingly familiar, was the unmistakable perfume that was his own. Michael took it into his lungs on a sigh, letting the memories in with it. Their melancholy was perfect. Like an immaculately preserved postcard from a long dead friend.

"I've wanted to see you for a very long time," he said.

Dr. Reid was motionless, maintaining a careful distance. Unless Michael's instincts were terribly corroded, he was debating whether he could actually make himself cross to the chair and put only a table between them.

He raised his eyes to Michael's, and they were full of fear. Exquisite, chaotic fear. That mercurial glow he hadn't seen in three years and which he dreamt of almost every night, when white limbs and red blood heated his hands again. When waking was a cruel and merciless affair.

"That wish has been mutual," Dr. Reid replied. "It's been…frustrating, not being able to conclude this investigation."

Michael stared at him. Took in every angle of his face, every sideways flicker of his eyes. The air was thin in his chest, not enough. The desire to touch him was a mad and untamed thing, a thing that had slept as if dead for too long.

"I don't care about that," he said softly.

The doctor regarded him for a moment, unnaturally still, before taking a hesitant step towards the chair Rossi had been in moments ago. With measured movements, he propped his cane against the edge of the table and folded himself into the seat. He had to shift his leg into a sufficiently comfortable position, and at one point his face twitched with pain.

"It hurts?" Michael said. "Your leg."

"A little," Dr. Reid admitted.

He placed the four files in their manila jackets on the table, and Michael watched his long pale hands before they disappeared into his lap.

"So," he said, with a subtle top note of what Michael thought was trepidation. "Where are they?"

"In a hurry, are we?" Michael smiled. "You won't even ask me how I've been?"

Dr. Reid's turn to stare. "How have you been?" he said after a long and reluctant pause. Michael wasn't sure whether to be amused or annoyed.

"Bored," he said. "Mind-numbingly bored. Fantastically bored. I've reached levels of boredom previously uncharted. Have you ever been so bored you could literally die?"

Maintaining his stare, Dr. Reid didn't answer. It was unclear whether he'd even gotten the joke. He simply watched Michael. Weighed and assessed. His mask of calm was perfect, and the only part of him Michael could read were the chinks in the amour that were his eyes. This close, the difference in him was nothing short of radical, and the years since the basement hung like a fine mist between them. Easy to see through but impossible to deny.

Michael leaned forward an inch. Studied that constructed blandness like it was complex source code. It was flawless. Unforced and effortless, so practiced it couldn't be seen unless you knew it was there.

The doctor retrieved one hand from his lap and placed it, palm down, on top of the folders. There was a sandy whisper of skin on paper.

"Where are they?" he repeated, his modulated voice clashing with the storm in his eyes.

"My, my. You are in a hurry," Michael idled. "You need to learn to pace yourself. I don't remember you being this careless."

"Careless?" Dr. Reid repeated, confused. "What makes you say that?"

"See?" Michael said. "Now I recognize you. You take your time, you devise a strategy. You don't just blunder on like most of the knuckleheads I've seen in here."

Something akin to annoyance was allowed a fleeting stay around the doctor's mouth. He turned his attention to the folders. Opening the jacket of the topmost file, he flipped yellowed pages with no apparent intent to read them. Without a word, he loosened a photograph from a paperclip and positioned it in the middle of the table, facing himself.

Upside down, Michael still recognized José. It was not a mug shot, which was the only picture of him alive that Michael had seen before, but a candid snap of a smiling young man with a heavily tattooed arm slung about his shoulders. The owner of the arm had been cut from the photo.

The doctor retrieved a picture of Evan from another file, then the two digital compositions of Charlie and James that Michael himself had helped put together. Evan was posing confidently, spreading his arms to show off the Halloween costume he was wearing, while Charlie and James were passable likenesses at best, the composed features blunt and lifeless and completely lacking the fragile beauty of the living specimens. They looked more like their corpses, when they had stared from the graves he'd dug deep for them in secret places.

"What's this for?" he asked, too curious to restrain himself. "Not for me, obviously."

"No," Dr. Reid said, adjusting the last picture so that the dead boys were evenly spaced before him. "That's right. It's for me."

Studying his face, Michael wondered if he'd been playing a game since he walked in the door. If the insistence to cut to the chase had been a simple trick to make him think no such games were on the agenda.

"I'm intrigued," he admitted. "Why do you need to see them? Do you forget their faces? I do, sometimes. Some of them look so much alike I can't recall which is which."

"I know their faces," Dr. Reid said quietly, meeting his eyes.

"Yes," Michael drawled, "I know. I heard they only needed to screen the videos once at the hearings, to establish that you remembered everything correctly. You did."

It was less than a second, a fraction of a heartbeat, but it was there; a flash of something primal and a gritting of his teeth as if to bite back a profanity. Michael smiled. So he _had_ been forced to sit through it. Michael had suspected as much, but had never known for sure.

"I've never seen them, myself, of course," he went on. "What was it, again? Thirty-two hours of relevant material?"

"Thirty-one," Dr. Reid replied, and the swift, dry answer suggested he'd had little to no difficulties digesting the mention of his own pain and humiliation re-enacted in front of a roomful of lawyers. The experience had presumably been picked apart by a therapist, and Michael sensed that he would achieve very little in continuing on the path in question.

"So what's with the pictures?" he said instead, nodding towards the pretty display.

Dr. Reid splayed his piano hands below the boys, fingers laced. An old man squatting in his young, graceful body.

"It's to remind myself why I'm here," he said. "And that my intentions with this meeting have nothing to do with what happened to me."

"What happened to you," Michael repeated, numbly. The choice of words, and so coolly said, was disturbing. Their time together needed … more. In all his time here, in his dreams and reminiscing and reliving, his pathetic inertia, he himself had failed to find adequate expression for it.

"You mean to say that your wish to see me has nothing to do with – us?"

Dr. Reid raised his eyebrows. Vigilance slid a keen edge into his gaze; vigilance and just a gust of bewilderment. The words had thrown him.

"I'm here for them," he said, without looking at the pictures. "To find them."

"And as soon as I tell you where they are, you'll leave and I'll never see you again."

Dr. Reid was silent. Stared searchingly across the table, eager to find something, anything, that he could analyze. Did he ever stop?

Michael hadn't meant to speak so candidly. He closed his eyes, shutting out the distracting sight of the doctor. He felt that wild thing again, lifting something from the depths that had been long submerged. He was beginning to feel an inexplicable need to let it come, to let it take his control and wield it as its own. He knew what it was; it had taken him years to learn how to rein it in and channel it properly. Now, somehow, it was back to its original form, unrefined, the way it had been with Jonah, with the others he had thoughtlessly used in the early days before the process.

"There's this woman in Atlanta," Dr. Reid said. Michael opened his eyes, thinking with a twitch of irritation that the doctor was going to bring up his love life unsolicited, but he went on: "that I visit sometimes at the psychiatric facility where she's incarcerated. Like you, she knows where someone is, someone I want to find. His name is Adam."

"Is?" Michael repeated, once again uncertain where the conversation was going. There seemed to be a lot of that today. "He's alive?"

"That's the thing," Dr. Reid replied. "I don't know. I hope so."

There was a pause, in which he studied the photographs with his head bent. From left to right, José to James. Michael tried to remember them, the time he'd had with them, but there was nothing there. He couldn't recall how it had felt to be inside them, nor the sound of their screams. The smell of them, the heat – it was all gone. It was as if the doctor, being here, cancelled them out.

"It's my job, you know," Dr. Reid murmured.

"What?"

Dr. Reid did not look up. His eyes were on the photographs, unwavering on the photographs. "It's my job," he repeated, a notch louder this time. "Interviewing people like you. Studying you. It's my job to establish perimeters inside which your behavior and thought processes and speech patterns can be interpreted and assembled to construct a comprehensive analysis."

"I love it when you talk dirty," Michael said huskily. It didn't work; the doctor did not take his eyes from the photographs.

"My point is," he said slowly, as if there had been no interruption, "that I do this for a living. It wouldn't fall outside of my job description to – to see you again."

At some point during this sentence, Michael had held his breath. He wondered dizzily what verb the doctor had been about to use before he said "see".

"Do you mean that?"

The query came out breathless, pathetic. Michael didn't care. The implications of what he'd just heard were too enormous, too vast, and barreled over him like a tall, opaque wave. He was absurdly thankful, now, for the doctor's refusal to lift his attention from the photographs.

"That I can see you again?" said Dr. Reid, still staring at his lineup of lost, beautiful boys. "Of course. Do you think I'd lie about that?"

"Yes," replied Michael at once, and again it was without substance, childlike in its supplication.

"Do you?"

When he looked up at long last, not indignant or surprised or puzzled but something else, something new, Michael was certain, for one soaring second, that his heart would stop right then and there. When it kept on beating he was distantly disappointed. It would have been a good death. The only thing better would have been if he could have touched him, kissed him, felt him one last time. To have taken him ... to have died while still inside him ...

The doctor was frowning in a way that could only mean his thoughts had taken some expression on his face. He let it slacken, fall into neutrality, as he inwardly cursed David Rossi and his little suit-puppy. This would not be happening, he would not be falling apart like this if he hadn't blundered in where he wasn't welcome. He hadn't even been there. He hadn't even searched for him, hadn't been there. Hadn't been there.

"I think ..." Michael began, and had to clear his throat to go on, "I think you would say anything to get me to give you the coordinates. If you could have water boarded me I'd be soaking wet right now."

Dr. Reid's mouth twitched. "That's funny," he commented.

"Thank you."

"I'm not lying, though."

And he turned his attention back to the photographs. Michael had forgotten to control his face a quickly as he'd remembered to, and left the half-formed grimace where it was, left his hands as fists in his lap, left the thought-smothering, debilitating desperation to roam all over the face of the beast that was now clawing its way, slowly but surely, out of the abyss.

"But ... what do you mean?" he asked. It wasn't quite a plea, but something akin to it. The doctor was eerily motionless for a moment, full lips pursed as he searched the faces of James, José, Evan and Charlie. Then he looked up once again, and that strange, new thing was there again. What was it? Michael didn't know it, didn't recognize it, couldn't read it. Perhaps he was simply too upset to – yes, yes, that would be it. Had to be it.

"I mean I'm not lying," he said. "I actually assumed there would be more meetings after this one. Three more, to be exact."

The world flared and pulsed like a kaleidoscope. Michael tried to summon the old clarity, the sharpness of the basement, when he had seen everything sharpened, heightened to all it could be. But it was all warped, now, the calibrations off enough to muddle it into a tilting mess that was making him feel vaguely nauseated.

Was this what it felt like to be like? It had been so long, he couldn't remember – had it been like this? To have no control?

"Three?" was all he managed to voice, his eye drawn to the boys on the table. "So ..."

And he couldn't say it. Couldn't birth it with breath. The doctor, looking far more relaxed than he'd done just a minute ago, helped him.

"You give me one boy today. I will come back, and each time I do, you give me another."

Feeling his mouth shape the words he'd just heard, as if to help him comprehend them, Michael stared at his prize. His glorious, shining prize, one whole piece of calm, stone-faced profiler.

He knew what it was he'd seen on his face. It _was _new, brand new, and it was bright and clear and strong because the battle they had both prepared to fight today was over.

Michael breathed, took the scent of him inside himself. He could feel the scar on his neck tingle like it sometimes did on cold days.

It was triumph.


	4. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

_Your head is splitting because it's full of ghosts._

* * *

Maybe it was the warmth, or the soft, sparse glow of the lanterns, or maybe it was the spring night and all the scents it held. Nothing was dark here except the sooty shadows spilling out across the grass, and nothing was, for once, wrong. Everything was gentle and peaceful, and a profound thankfulness to be alive seemed to permeate the very air. Reid was very much aware that it was a fleeting thing, a stretch of time taking a shape it almost never took, and he saw the same awareness in the faces of his team. But it was okay. They would take what they could get.

He watched JJ and Will and Henry, and after the boy was put to bed he watched his parents, watched the utter bliss in Will's face crowd out the pain of his injured shoulder, watched the serenity in JJ, that calm she had always possessed settling and swaying in time with the music. She was a vision in her white dress, and he couldn't remember ever being angry with her, not even when Emily waltzed past with Morgan right next to the newlyweds, a reminder if there ever was one. He couldn't remember Emily being officially dead all those months, couldn't remember the cravings or the increased frequency of his nightmares, couldn't remember the way the headaches had seemed to take physical forms in the dark corners of his apartment. This night, just this once, it didn't matter.

It was a dull density at the base of his skull, now, nothing more. But then, he had grown accustomed. He'd found the right mix-and-match technique with ibuprofen and beta-blockers and was well-acquainted with the benefits of a single glass of red wine before bed. The pain itself seemed to have grown into his backbone. He had no memory of what it was like not to feel it. And tonight it was distant, vague, as though it was purposefully keeping to the sidelines.

It was nearing midnight. The party was getting wilder, loosening around the edges. Several couples had ventured out onto the shadowy lawn, and the music was fast and urgent. When Garcia whirled out from the dance floor and stretched a graceful hand towards Reid, leaving a dazed and ruffled Kevin in her wake, he had already made up his mind.

"One more," he said sternly, and let himself be manhandled onto the bathing lantern light on the parquet pieces. Unlike Garcia (and most of the others, for that matter), he'd stuck to his habit and only had one glass of champagne. Whenever he had more he felt compelled to go to a meeting, so it was more of a practical precaution than anything else.

Garcia held on to him like a lobster for two and a half songs, and then Emily was suddenly there to save him. Or so he thought.

"One more?" she suggested and smiled, holding out her hand palm up. Her nail polish had not quite managed to disguise the fact that her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

"You okay?" Reid asked as they moved slowly between Rossi dancing with Beth and Kevin attempting some deranged version of a tango with Morgan.

"What?" said Emily absently, her eyes on Garcia, who was laughing and pointing at the latter couple.

"You seem distracted," Reid clarified. "Is there something in your mind?"

Emily looked at him, then, abruptly and sharply observant. "Is there something on yours?" she countered. Reid inclined his head.

"You caught me."

"The anniversary's coming up." It wasn't a question, and Reid felt his eyes narrowing.

"Now _you're_ trying to distract _me_."

She looked ashamed for such an infinitesimal fraction of a second that Reid couldn't be sure he hadn't imagined it, and then there was sympathy in the lines around her mouth. "I'm serious," she said softly. "It'll be five years ago."

"I know," Reid sighed. Very briefly like a camera flash, there and gone, the overhead lanterns seemed to glow a little brighter.

"You feeling okay about it?"

"I was planning to visit him, actually." Reid said, without having intended to. Emily looked startled.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

They were both silent for a moment, dancing and listening to the music and the laughter. Then Emily took a long, shaky breath.

"I'm gonna go."

Reid met her eyes. They were steady.

"Me, too," he replied, trying to interpret the tightness in her jaws. He was unsuccessful; she was too good for him. Always had been.

"It's late. And my head's kind of killing me," he added, lying for good measure.

It was sudden and unexpected and Reid had no time to freeze; she reached up and placed her hand on the side of his face. They had stopped dancing. For a strange, surreal moment, Reid thought he could feel her pulse through that light touch, and that it was racing.

_I just don't understand any of it anymore._

"You're so much stronger than me," Emily said quietly, almost a whisper. Reid frowned. He would have argued, but there was something in her face, in her dark, striking eyes, that stopped him.

"Do you need a ride?" he said instead. "I took my car."

* * *

They made their good-byes to JJ and Will, but left the others to their revelry. JJ looked into Reid's eyes a second or two longer than he was comfortable with, and he pulled her into a long hug. He didn't want her to worry. Not tonight.

"Oh my God," Emily said when he led her down the drive to his Amazon. "What _is _this thing?"

"It's a classic, and shut up," Reid said firmly, opening the passenger door for her. She looked between him and the cracked leather seat, and pulled her wrap tighter about her shoulders. For a second it looked as though she'd refuse, but Reid knew for a fact she'd come here with Morgan and had no other way out.

"That doesn't sound good," she complained when Reid turned the key in the ignition and the engine sputtered weakly. "That _really _doesn't sound –"

"I guess it's not all that far to walk to the subway from here – two point four kilometres, in fact, provided you get through the rougher neighborhoods in one piece in that dress …"

"I'll shut up," Emily said quickly. Reid smirked, jabbed the key once more and applied some violence, and turned a toothy grin her way when the car revved into life. Emily, having gripped the door handle with one hand and splayed the other over the glove compartment, didn't appear to see it.

She didn't complain once during the drive, but nor did she say anything else. Reid happily ignored the half-chocked sounds that might have been curses, and the way she squeezed her eyes shut at the left turns, and when he dropped her off, she first seemed keen to get as far away from him as possible.

Then she paused on the curb, her black hair shifting in blue under the cold streetlights. She turned to lean down by the window. Reid rolled it down, admitting the cool, smoke-scented night. Her face looked pale, different than it had done under lanterns.

She was quiet for a while, just looking at him from under a pensive frown. When she finally spoke, it was hesitant, and didn't sound like her at all.

"Do you think it's a good idea to visit him that day?"

"Why do you ask?" Reid enquired slowly.

"I just think, maybe … isn't it better to move on?"

"You think I haven't moved on?" Reid said, unable to keep a tiny bite out of his words. Emily closed her eyes.

"No, I … uh …" she floundered, voice trembling, "I mean, don't you want to forget?"

Reid searched her face. Let the silence between them fill with the city. A siren sang somewhere far away. "Do you think we can?"

She blinked, perhaps not sure she'd heard him right. Reid waited, watched her gaze slide off to the sides, watched her remember that there was a door at her back. Tension crept into her back and shoulders, and he felt guilty.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, face heating, "I – I didn't mean to equate, I mean, your experience differed from mine on a wide variety of integral points –"

"Yours was worse," Emily cut him off. She looked at him levelly, and Reid heard the air seep from his lungs in a thin sigh. Again he found that he wanted to argue, and again something in her face warned him not to.

"I'm going to go to bed," she said, sounding almost like herself again.

"Me, too," Reid lied, and returned her smile with one of his own.

* * *

Five years felt like forever. The decision had been long in the making. He reasoned that it could be chalked up to the state of the economy more than anything else. He'd bought it for almost nothing; the realtor had in fact been overjoyed to be rid of it since, at the time, it had seemed like an impossible task getting it sold for anything remotely approaching what it had fetched back in '02.

This was America. Houses dropped in value because they were rumored to be haunted. There had been plenty of such rumors, here, and they had been the least of the realtor's problems.

Lydia had not been pleased. She had been knee deep in wedding plans by the time David learned (from Lydia's father, no less) that the police were letting the house go. He'd secured an appointment early on a Monday morning; a time set, he knew, to avoid ghouls. At the time, he hadn't been entirely certain he didn't fit into the category himself.

He didn't know how many afternoons he'd spent, waiting for Lydia to get home, just staring out the window across the street. On occasion there would be people on the curb, sometimes with cameras. Well into 2008 there had been a security detail ready to respond exclusively to any break-ins or disturbances at the address, and he'd seen them drive past more than once, had even seen them stop and get out once or twice just take a lap with their hands on their Tasers before driving off again. It was a nice house. Fresh. The owners between '97 and '02 had renovated the kitchen and bathrooms. It looked a lot like the house David lived in, only larger. And David didn't have a basement.

"The fireplace is fully functional," the estate agent had chirped, leading him through the hall to a spacious living room. "Not electric. It's very nice, a classic modern style, and the chimney's well-tended. Since this is a valley it gets nippy in the winters, and it's just priceless to have a nice fire going on those dark nights."

David had smiled. He hadn't told her his house had an identical hearth.

"Hardwood floors, only ten years old. There haven't lived any children here since the mid-nineties, but it is very child-friendly with a bit of work. The smallest of the three bedrooms used to be a study, but it would be perfect for a nursery." David _had _mentioned he was engaged.

She took him to the doorway of the former study and stopped, and his eyes skated over the slight indentations in the floor where a desk must have stood. She didn't go in, and David, for some reason, didn't either.

"It's a wonderful kitchen, if you ask me," she'd said warmly and spread her arm wide, indicating the gleaming countertops. "The windows lets a lot of light in, especially in the summer."

David's eyes had sought out the heavy steel door situated in a little dip in the wall. It was painted the same white as the plaster. The agent had seen him looking, and her eyes had turned briefly to slits. She had waited a beat, before seeming to decide he didn't look like someone she wanted away from her sale as fast as possible.

"I have to ask, sir – are you aware of what's happened in this house? Because I'm obligated to law to tell you, and if you already know … well, then I won't have to say it out loud."

She smiled awkwardly, seemed on the brink of giggling, and pursed her lips all in under a second.

"I know," David had sighed. He'd hesitated. "Fact is, I live across the street. My girl and I, we'll be looking for something bigger, and I … I don't know. I knew the guy a little."

The estate agent had frozen. She's peered at him. Had tilted her head to the side.

"Do you want to see it?" she'd asked quietly. "The basement?"

David had opened his mouth to say 'yes'. He'd stared at the painted bolts all around the frame of the door. Then he'd shaken his head.

As it turned out, Lydia didn't want to live in the house. After asking David ad infinitum if he was mentally ill, she'd insisted that she wanted out of the street altogether. She wanted an apartment.

"What about those kids you've always wanted?"

"You can have kids in an apartment!" she'd shouted, and there had been a whole week when neither of them were sure whether or not they were having a fight.

"Nobody's going to buy that place," David complained. "It's going to stand there and wilt. Like a ghost."

"But why do _you _want to buy it?"

He hadn't been able to answer her.

And then, in early 2010, he'd come home and found a teenaged girl standing in the street outside number twenty-four. Liddy was inside, bedridden due to complications with her pregnancy, and David had stopped, briefcase in hand, to gape as the girl pulled a set of wire cutters from her backpack and proceeded to cut a hole in the five-foot fence that had been put up last year. He'd taken a step down the driveway, then another, as the girl folded the cut portion out of the way and climbed cumbersomely onto the property. She had Converse sneakers on her feet and spiky hair dyed a garish red.

David had wanted to cry out, to protest somehow, but he found himself closing his mouth tight, dropping his briefcase to the ground, and starting at a half-jog towards number twenty-four.

The girl had thrown the wire cutters aside in the brown shrubbery flanking the driveway. David vaulted the fence and paused, looking around for her, before he heard glass breaking.

"Shit," he hissed and sprinted around the house for the back, where there was a small patio and a back door to the living room. The girl was reaching through a jagged hole in the glass to unlock the door. She did not hear David crossing the parched lawn, and popped the door open when he was right behind her.

"What are you doing?" he asked. The girl screamed. She stumbled away from the door, her feet catching on the bag she had dropped on the patio boards, and fell.

"Whoa," David said, raising his hands. "I'm not gonna hurt you."

The girl was not afraid. She was perhaps fifteen, maybe younger, and her eyes, which were a distinct, pale blue, were daggers on David. She picked herself to her feet, and raised a small can of mace that she had pulled from her bag.

"Get away from me, pervert! I'll call the police!"

"You should do that. Tell them there's a break-in in progress." David said, his hands still aloft. The girl glared.

"What do you care?" she said, her face suddenly contorting with rage. "It's not your house."

"Actually, it is."

She blinked. "What?"

"It's my house. I bought it last month."

She opened her mouth, closed it again. Looked past David towards the fence, then behind her. Locating escape routes.

"You wanna tell me why you're breaking in to it? There's nothing inside. It's empty."

"I know," she said, warily.

"Then why …?"

"Because!" she spluttered inarticulately. There was something, some quality in her voice that David didn't like. She was too young for it.

"What's your name? How old are you?" he asked, lowering his hands. "And put that down."

The girl looked at the mace like she'd forgotten she was aiming it, and grudgingly slipped it back inside her bag. "I'm thirteen," she said, with a hint of pride. "And it's none of your business what my name is."

"Really? Because I think the police might want to know, you know, when I call them." He reached into his jacket for his cell phone.

"Wait!" said the girl. She was quiet for a moment, seeming to contemplate her options. She looped her pack back around her shoulders. "It's Rose. Rose Preston."

"Okay, Rose Preston. Why are you breaking into this house?"

She stared up at him, her forget-me-not eyes intense and unearthly. David saw the roots of her hair; they were golden brown, almost blond against the angry red.

"My father died in this house," she said.

Her tone said she wanted to shock him, but that burning depth in her gaze, the desperate, pleading something in her features, said otherwise. David's mind came to a standstill.

"Your … father. Your father was …"

"Michael Preston," Rose supplied. "He was murdered in the basement of this house."

He gazed down at her, his thoughts hurtling back to the myriad of articles that had followed in the wake of the arrest, the indictment and the conviction respectively. Then there had been the anniversaries, the coverage of the search for the missing bodies, the interviews with the bereaved …

Those eyes had stared back at him from photographs. A young man, too young-looking to be a father, with golden brown hair and lovely, lovely eyes. He'd been one of two victims who had children, and consequently of more interest to the media than the rest.

"I guess we don't need a key, huh?" David said to Rose, and led the way through the back door into the house.

That was the first time he saw the basement. He hadn't been down there since, and wasn't expecting to have to make that descent any time soon. He still dreamt about it, and Rose's childlike, guttural, desperate weeping wound through those dreams like piano wire.

Now the five-year anniversary of the murders was just around the corner. Michael had been promoted twice and had spent two years turning the house into something it hadn't been. They had worked from top to bottom, knocking out no less than seven walls and ripping out the pristine kitchens and bathrooms to place them elsewhere. There was an addition on the ground floor, poking out onto the back lawn and swallowing the old patio, and Alexander's room took up a portion of the old master bedroom.

They hadn't gotten to the basement yet. Rose came, every year on the day of the discovery of her father's body, to sit in the middle of the floor for ten to twenty minutes. She talked to him sometimes; feeling dirty and perverted, David had listened at the top of the stairs.

He thought it was her at the door that Monday morning. He didn't know why. It just slipped into his head that it had to be her, she had come early this year. It was a fluke that he was even home. He'd dropped Alex at his kindergarten and seen Lydia off and decided, on a whim he couldn't really explain, to work from home. It was a beautiful day, warm and full of birdsong, and he'd taken his laptop and a thermos of coffee out onto the deck.

He padded barefoot through the hall, past the staircase and to the front door, where he peered through the peephole, firmly expecting to see Rose's eerie blue eyes. He never knew what color her hair was going to be, and for a confused second, as he looked upon a head of wild, golden brown curls, he thought she had decided to strip the dye. Then he saw the eyes.

He opened the door, acknowledging a sensation like falling rapidly swooping though his gut.

"Can I help you?"

"I don't know," mused the man, throwing glances down the sides of the house. "This _is _number twenty-four?"

He sounded dubious.

"Yeah," David confirmed. "Sure is. Can I help you with something?"

The man frowned uncertainly, still looking at what parts of the exterior of the house that he could see from the front step. He gazed at the driveway for a few seconds, then seemed to force his eyes back to David. They were large and brown and set deep under thick, frowning eyebrows. He was tall, taller than David, and skinny as a reed. The smile on his lips was tentative, awkward. David's mind leapt to the assumption that he was a student at the college, even with the rumpled black suit he was wearing. There was housing in this neighborhood, and the dorms weren't far.

Something blue caught his eye, and no sooner had he identified the ancient Volvo parked a little ways down the street before the kid spoke again, throwing David completely off guard: "I'm with the FBI."

David was inclined to believe he was making some sort of joke, before he pulled out a very real-looking badge from an inside pocket of his blazer. Definitely not his car, then. Who drove that thing? He'd have to ask around at the next barbecue.

"I was hoping to have a look at the house as part of a conclusive inter-departmental article on the Riverside Stalker case; it's standard procedure at the five-year mark. I assume you've heard of the case, but if not, I'd be happy to summarize it for you."

"Of course I … uh … okay." David blinked and shook his head. The agent had stated his business very fast, without breathing, and David was stepping back from the doorway before he even knew what he was doing.

"Thank you sir, that's very helpful," the kid – the fed – speeded on, carefully yet absently working the soles of his loafers over the rug inside the door with the air of someone who had walked into many strangers' homes.

He stretched out a long-fingered hand. "I'm Dr. Reid."

"David Malcolm." He shook the hand; it was dry and cool and all knuckles. "But – doctor? I thought you said you were FBI."

"I am," said Dr. Reid. "I'm also a doctor."

David half-wanted to ask of what, and how old was he anyway, but it recalled his first exchange with Rose and found himself pushing the words away before he said them. "So … what do you want to see?" he asked instead, scratching the back of his neck. He thought the little hairs there were standing up. But why would they?

"You've done some extensive remodeling," Dr. Reid stated, looking around. He didn't answer the question.

"Yeah," David agreed as he followed the lanky creature into the house. "Yeah, we … we wanted to change it."

"Understandable," said Dr. Reid. He was at the staircase, and glanced upwards as he passed it. They reached the kitchen and dining area, where a row of sliding glass stood open to the morning. The sun was on the deck from morning until the late afternoon, and David's thermos and open laptop glinted like mirrors.

"You don't suppose I could get a cup from that?" asked Dr. Reid politely, indicating the thermos. "I've had a long drive."

"Oh – of course. Let me just …" David crossed to the kitchen, took a mug from a cabinet and doubled outside to fill it.

"Sugar?" Dr. Reid enquired, and David took the three steps to the kitchen again to oblige him. He said 'stop' after an alarming amount of spoonfuls, and David felt compelled to joke, "You really did have a long drive."

"That's what I said," replied Dr. Reid, looking puzzled. He gulped his coffee like it was Diet Coke.

"How long have you lived here?" he asked, spidering through to the living room. He had long legs and moved as fast as he talked, and David had to jog a little to keep up.

"Two years. Why are you – do you really need to see the whole house? Isn't it just the …"

He trailed off. Dr. Reid had come to a halt by the fireplace, the only thing that was unchanged from before the remodel. He was studying the family pictures on the mantle. David couldn't see his face, but his back was very straight and he was standing very still.

"That's Alex," he said, moving up beside the agent and taking down his favorite photo of his son. "He's two. Like the house."

"He's beautiful," Dr. Reid said quietly, his dark eyes following the picture of the laughing child as David put it back on the mantle.

"Thank you. He's a good kid."

"I'm sure," Dr. Reid said. He'd finished his coffee in less than ninety seconds, and now turned to place it carefully on the coffee table. As soon as he'd put the mug down, his right hand went to his left arm, where he rubbed at something through his sleeve like he was in pain. He did not seem aware that he was doing it.

"Would you mind showing me the basement, Mr. Malcolm?"

David didn't go down there himself; Lydia had stored her bicycle and some other odds and ends at one time or another, but David didn't utilize the space. There was no need; it was a big house. He still had no idea what he wanted it for. Filling it with sand had frequently seemed like a good idea.

Now, with the agent at his back, he flicked the switch, which was outside the door. He thought he could hear a little intake of breath from Dr. Reid, but had no time to dwell on it since the very sound of the basement door made every hair on his body stand on end, not just the ones at the back of his neck.

It was bright and white down there, the steps steep and hard. Alex couldn't work the heavy door open by himself, but when he got older they would have to keep it locked. Anyone could kill themselves falling on those steps.

"I hope you don't have a dust allergy," he said over his shoulder to Dr. Reid as they began to descend. "We don't use it. Haven't decided what to do with it, yet."

Behind him, Dr. Reid stopped on one of the topmost steps. "You haven't remodeled it?" he asked quietly. The door had closed behind them, and his voice sounded spooky, whispering past David down the steps into the empty hole below.

"No," he said, turning on the steps to face the agent. Once again, the man was standing unnaturally still. He made David think of a deer that had wandered into the backyard one early morning last winter. Alex had been delighted. They'd watched it through the window for over fifteen minutes, the way it would freeze and look up with big soft eyes, apprehensive, whenever it heard something, however harmless. Bony and graceful all at once, ready to bolt at any given second.

"Why not?" asked Dr. Reid, still not moving. His doe eyes were fixed on David.

"Because …" David searched for a response. He didn't want to tell him about Rose, for some reason. That was none of his business. "Because we don't know what to do with it, I guess," he finished lamely. "We've been postponing. I think maybe, we don't _want _to use it."

Dr. Reid stared at him for another moment, then nodded slowly. He wet his lips, lizard-like. It occurred to David that he looked nervous.

"Should I …?" David said; Dr. Reid gestured vaguely for him to keep going.

When they were both standing on the basement floor, David felt a need to break the sudden silence. He hesitated, watching the doctor's hand rubbing at that same spot on his arm again, then said, "I read in the paper that they buried the last of those missing bodies. Los Angeles, was it?"

"Yeah," said Dr. Reid absently, his eyes traveling slowly over the blank, white walls. His Adam's apple was moving up and down the length of his throat. "Yeah, he was from there."

"It said you paid for it." David stood still as the doctor moved slowly, searchingly along the walls. He seemed only distantly aware that David was even there.

"I did, yeah," he said sluggishly. David blinked.

"_You _did? I meant that … uh, that the FBI did?"

"That's correct," said Dr. Reid in that same slow voice, like he hadn't heard a word.

David stared, transfixed, as the agent made his way into the far corner and stopped, his head bent low. He stood like that, rubbing his arm, as the seconds amounted to thirty and more. David's skin began to crawl, and he took a silent step closer. In the glaring light, the same lights that had illuminated the things that had happened here, he saw an ugly scar protruding from the crisp white collar of the doctor's shirt.

He stopped. His thoughts worked tiredly around something that wouldn't quite take shape. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask something, but his voice just sat unused in his throat.

When he finally moved, David was startled. The agent lifted his head, causing the scar to disappear back behind his collar, and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. David looked where he was looking and saw the rough holes in the upper portion of the wall where he had been told there had once been a camera and a set of speakers mounted. The doctor hadn't had to search for them; he'd known exactly where they were.

Still staring at the missing chunks of concrete, like bites out of a sandwich, the agent fumbled in his pocked and retrieved a cell phone. He snapped a picture of the holes, then turned to look at David. The intensity of his gaze struck David like a punch in the gut, and he studied that bony, pale face, the tumble-down hair that was almost the exact same color as Rose's father's had been.

"Would you mind leaving me down here for a couple of minutes?" asked Dr. Reid, and his voice was surprisingly steady. David had expected it to quaver. "I need to take some photographs, assemble some notes. If you don't mind, Mr. Malcolm."

"No," David bleated. "No, no. Of course not. Take as much time as you need. I'll be upstairs if you need anything."

He was already backing towards the stairs. Dr. Reid's face was lit by a fleeting, tight-lipped smile.

"You've been extremely helpful, Mr. Malcolm. Thank you for your patience."

"No problem."

He paused at the bottom of the stairs, and they looked at each other. Reid knew David had figured it out, and it didn't bother him. He had always known that Garcia's efforts to keep him anonymous would only work for so long.

The scar on his neck tingled, and he sucked down a stream of dank basement air. As David Malcolm hurried back up the stairs into his beautiful house, where he had raised his beautiful son with his beautiful wife, he told himself it didn't taste like anything.

It was just a basement.

* * *

AN: So, that was that. The End. Thanks for sticking with me. I love you if you review. I always want more!

Sequel planned for 2017, starring spunky young hacker Rosie Preston, whose sole purpose in life is to machete her way through the jungle to the protected identity of the man who survived what her father didn't. Meanwhile, someone is copying the Stalker killings and eluding the FBI ... just kidding. Maybe. No, I am. Kidding, I mean. Seriously.


End file.
